Editor’s Note: In Part 1 of Serlet’s series on municipal automation, he looked at a generally unobjectionable use of AI technology: Chicago’s restaurant-inspection program. As he explained:
There are countless mundane things that municipal governments do. These might include processing building permits, collecting residential taxes or distributing school supplies to needy families. Many of these services are provided inefficiently. They also require large expensive staffs. The rise of technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) has created an obvious opportunity: automating municipal services to make them more efficient. Obviously, there are many things that can go wrong. Although AI has taken the media spotlight, automation includes a wide range of technologies such as traditional algorithmic prediction and digital identity. Municipal services automation has miraculous potential, but comes with significant risks.
This week, Serlet looks at a program that offers some benefits, but also creates some risks.
California’s Mobile Driver’s Licenses
Like many states, California has started issuing mobile driver’s licenses. They are digital identity apps that can be used instead of physical licenses. In the short term, they can be used wherever a driver’s license can be used. In the long term, mobile licenses could evolve to become much more complex systems. If expanded, mobile driver’s licenses could become a single login which could be used to log into any government services; and after that even private websites might accept them.
This is a complicated project which was built by many private companies working together. The biometrics and facial recognition was provided by iProov. Its age verification is provided by TruAge. Many other companies such as Conexxus and the National Association of Convenience Stores also collaborated on the project. Finally, the end product can be used on multiple different wallets provided by companies such as Google, Microsoft and Apple.
There appears to be a popular appetite for expanding the program. The Boston Consulting Group surveyed Californians to determine if there were a popular appetite to expand it into a full-fledged e-government service suite. Approximately 86% of Californians were open to using a mobile driver’s license; 68% wanted to personalize California’s government services and 58% wanted to be able to complete more government interactions online. Most importantly for the long term expansion of the program, 84% wanted to be able to use multiple devices at the same time when interacting with the government online.
Digital identity is one of the most popular forms of e-government. Key State Capital, a venture capital consortium that invests in the industry, published research that found that there are more than 400 government-backed digital identity initiatives worldwide and more than 70 in the United States.
While writing this article, I spoke to Timothy Ruff, the founder of Digital Trust Venture Partners, and an expert in digital identity and mobile driver’s licenses. “Mobile driver’s licenses are spyware. There is great danger in being tracked everywhere and having all of your behaviors correlated,” he said.
When a traditional driver’s license is checked, nobody knows that the license has been checked. The mobile driver’s licenses were marketed to the public as having the same properties of physical licenses in this regard. In theory, the driver’s licenses can be checked by bartenders or police officers locally, without querying data from a central server. That concept respects privacy.
The reality is very different. Ruff explained that mobile driver’s licenses often “phone home” every time they are checked. This means that there is a log that records when you get pulled over, when you buy alcohol or when you use government services. In the future, these logs could potentially be abused by the government to control the behavior of citizens. They could also get stolen by cybercriminals.
Ruff further explained:
Mobile driver’s licenses feature something called ‘device retrieval mode.’ This mode allows mobile driver’s licenses to have their information verified without communicating with a central server. This preserves privacy because you don’t generate activity logs for everyone. But the reality is that [the government] can quietly change the mode and nobody will know. At the flick of a switch, your mobile driver’s license can track everything you do. They can change modes without notifying the user and, suddenly, you are getting spied on.
When mobile driver’s licenses are only used in the ways traditional licenses are used, these logs aren’t a big problem. But as the scope of the mobile driver’s licenses increases to become a single login for all government services and even private services, it becomes far more concerning. For example, there are even proposals to require the mobile driver’s license or an alternative age verification to buy legal cannabis or access online pornography in California.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation shares Ruff’s concerns:
We also need governance that properly limits law enforcement access to information collected by mobile driver’s licenses, and to other information in the smartphones where holders place their mobile driver’s licenses. Further, we need safeguards against these state-created wallets being wedged into problematic realms like age-verification mandates as a condition of accessing the internet.
In the next installment, Part III will explore these questions further by looking at Hangzhou’s City Brain, a massive and somewhat creepy artificial intelligence system that is housed in a municipal database.
Thibault Serlet is a partner at Key State Capital, a Venture Capital consortium that invests in digital identity technology. He previously served as the president of the Adrianople Group, a business intelligence firm which helped investors finance the creation of new Special Economic Zones. He led the creation of several large scale datasets including the Web of Trust, a global database of decentralized digital identity projects, Open Zone Map, the world’s first global map of free zones, and the Charter Cities Institute’s New Cities Map.
