New South Wales lets drivers prove their age at the club door without showing their licence
An upgraded digital licence shares a single fact, that the holder is old enough, through a QR code. A statewide rollout is planned for next year.
The government of New South Wales is piloting an upgrade to its digital driver licence that lets people prove their age at pubs and clubs without handing over anything else. The state plans a full rollout next year.
Customers open the licence in the Service NSW app and generate a secure QR code, which the venue scans for an instant confirmation of age. The technique is called selective disclosure: the venue learns that the person is old enough, not their name, address or date of birth. Verification is provided by Mattr, a New Zealand company, and the upgraded licence meets the latest international standards for mobile driving licences.
The first drivers to receive the upgrade are in Western Sydney and the Blue Mountains, where more than 19,000 residents signed up before launch. The state is investing A$11.5 million in digital identity this year.
"This is the next step in modernising the driver licence, by making it easier to use while also securing people's personal details," said Jenny Aitchison, the roads minister. "We're giving motorists a better way to prove their identity, with stronger protections and less need to hand over their personal information."
Banks join in
Queensland's mobile licence is moving into banking at the same time. National Australia Bank says it is the first Australian bank to verify identity in branches by reading a customer's Queensland licence directly from their phone, using the ISO/IEC 18013-5 standard for secure device-to-device exchange. It chose Queensland because it was the first state to offer that encryption standard.
Age checks for alcohol have become an unlikely engine of digital identity adoption, in Australia as in the UK, where pubs can now legally accept certified digital identity. The lesson for governments is that the everyday, low-stakes check is often what gets a credential onto people's phones.
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