As digital ID adoption climbs, the public's expectation of what reasonable data handling looks like climbs with it.

Just a few years ago, “show me your ID” meant handing over a physical artifact, letting someone glance at it and getting it back. That exchange is being rewritten. Digital IDs and mobile driver’s licenses (mDLs) are showing up in more wallets, airports and government offices every month, and the agencies that once just had to train staff to spot a fake laminate are now being asked to verify a credential that lives inside someone’s phone.

We have a close-up view of what happens when an organization tries to accept 10, 20, 50 different versions of “prove you are who you say you are” at once. And right now, that’s the situation American agencies face.

The fragmentation problem is real, and it’s not going away on its own

In the United States, mDLs are quickly moving from pilot programs to mainstream digital identity infrastructure. As of October 2025, 76% of Americans lived in states where mDL programs were either live or in development, and as of June 2026, the American Association of Motor Vehicles Administrators’ digital ID map showed only eight states or territories not participating in digital ID schemes. REAL ID enforcement began in May 2025, further raising the stakes for secure, standards-based credentials. The Transportation Security Administration now accepts mDLs at more than 250 priority airports. Adoption is expected to accelerate into the tens of millions by the end of 2026 as large-population states expand their programs.

Still, the rollout remains fragmented, with states moving on different platforms, apps and timelines. Some are relying on Apple or Google Wallet, while others plan to build their own applications. This is making interoperability and standards alignment critical as mDLs become a more common part of everyday identity verification.

For federal program managers, this is a matter of 50 potential variations of the same basic question: Is this real, and is it this person? A benefits agency, a federal facility security desk, or a passport office can’t build 50 separate integrations, and they shouldn’t have to. This is exactly the kind of challenge that gets solved efficiently by a layer that sits beneath those state-specific formats and translates them into one consistent, verifiable signal. This is the same way payment networks let a merchant accept a card regardless of which bank issued it.

The technical standard the industry has rallied around, International Organization for Standardizated/International Electrotechnical Commission Standard 18013-7, already gives agencies a common language to build toward. This provides the government with a chance to build one system around a common standard, rather than manage differences across states.

Reusable identity’s role in data collection minimalization

Most public conversations about digital IDs focus on replacing the driver’s license you show a TSA officer. That’s the easy, visible use case. The more interesting shift, and the one I think matters more for the way the government thinks about privacy, is what happens when that same reusable credential gets applied to physical ID workflows that have nothing to do with travel.

Today, verifying things like that you’re over 21 or a state resident means handing over the entire document. A bartender sees everything from your full birth date to your driver’s license number just to confirm one fact. A reusable identity model flips that. Once you’ve verified your identity through a trusted process, you should be able to answer a specific question — I’m over 21, I’m a resident, I’m who I claim to be — without resurfacing the entire document every time. This reduces the amount of sensitive data sitting in any single system, which is also a cybersecurity win, since you can’t leak what you never collected in the first place. That distinction is critical for government services, where the same person often must repeatedly prove basic facts across different agencies and programs.

This is also where compliance expectations are heading, whether agencies are ready or not. As digital ID adoption climbs, the public’s expectation of what reasonable data handling looks like climbs with it. People who’ve gotten used to attesting rather than oversharing in one part of their life will start asking why a different government office still wants their full document just to check a single fact. Agencies that build toward reusable, minimal-disclosure verification now will be ahead of that expectation instead of playing catch-up to it later.

Designing for the world we’re entering

As verification methods become more sophisticated, so do the attempts to defeat them, and agencies should expect the same arms race playing out in the private sector to show up in government-facing systems too.

The agencies that get ahead will be the ones that build layered, standards-based verification now, treat reusable identity as a privacy tool rather than just a convenience feature, and accept that the state-by-state patchwork is a problem worth solving centrally rather than waiting out.

Alix Melchy is the vice president of AI at Jumio.

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