ALBANY – Apple, the maker of the iPhone, has lobbied state officials about the creation of a “mobile driver’s license” that would be stored on cellphones.
Apple has been at the forefront of efforts by the high-tech industry to digitize everything from concert tickets and credit cards to proof of vaccination status.
Apple has a special iPhone app called Wallet that is used to store digital versions of plane tickets and credit cards and other documents that can be scanned to make purchases at stores or pass through security checkpoints at airports and sports venues.
The next frontier in this digitizing of important documents is government IDs – including driver’s licenses, which Apple has been pushing states across the country to adopt.
State lobbying records show that officials with Apple and its lobbying firm, The Roffe Group of Albany, met in the second half of last year with Gregory Kline, the deputy commissioner for the state Department of Motor Vehicles.
Apple and its lobbyists talked to Kline about mobile driver’s licenses, lobbying records filed in January with the state Joint Commission on Public Ethics show. The meeting was categorized as dealing with a “state procurement” issue.
Kline is in charge of the DMV’s online services and is the DMV’s liaison to the state Office of Information Technology Services.
The records were updated later that month to include the fact that the two sides also spoke about Apple’s “announcement on digital identity cards” at the meeting.
The DMV did not respond to a request for comment on the meeting. Apple also did not respond to the Times Union.
Back in September, Apple announced that Arizona and Georgia would be the first two states to allow their residents to store digital versions their driver’s license or state ID cards on the iPhone and Apple Watch.
Apple said that Connecticut, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Oklahoma and Utah were also going to allow it. Apple said that the Transportation Security Administration had also agreed to accept the digital state IDs at security checkpoints.
“The addition of driver’s licenses and state IDs to Apple Wallet is an important step in our vision of replacing the physical wallet with a secure and easy-to-use mobile wallet,” Jennifer Bailey, Apple’s vice president of Apple Pay and Apple Wallet said in an Apple press release at the time.
News stories published by CNBC and others in November indicate that states that partner with Apple on digital IDs and driver’s licenses would have to pay for a portion of the costs. The contracts that Apple makes states sign to participate also gives the tech giant significant sway over the program, the stories revealed.
