How we're working to make digital identity a reality for everyone
Imagine starting a vacation like this: You arrive at the airport and breeze through security by tapping your phone to a reader, scanning your boarding pass and ID. While waiting to board, you grab a drink at an airport bar, tapping your phone to prove your age. When you arrive at your destination, you find your rental car and leave the lot without stopping for an in-person ID check because you already provided the necessary information in the rental car app. You check into your hotel online and your key is issued straight to your digital wallet. You do all of this with your phone — no physical wallet required.
This may feel futuristic, but it could be reality soon. In fact, today people with select U.S. state-issued IDs are able to present their ID in Google Wallet to go through TSA checkpoints in dozens of U.S. airports.
To make digital IDs even more useful, it’s crucial for key industries to collaborate to build a trusted solution anchored in privacy, security and interoperability. Here’s a look at how we’re working to implement digital identity and the key principles that will result in a safe system for digital identity.
Protecting privacy and security
Giving people a way to store and prove their identity from their mobile device is convenient and helpful. In fact, it’s been one of the top-requested features since we launched Google Wallet in 2022. But while digital IDs are convenient, they also must be private and secure. Identity credentials are highly personal and sensitive, and people should feel confident they are in control of their information — how it is stored, shared and used.
Google Wallet's security measures put you in full control of your digital identity and offer clear advantages over physical IDs in a number of ways:
Selective disclosure and user control: With digital identity, the relying party (a party requesting information, for example a car rental company or a merchant) is able to request only the relevant parts of a person’s ID. Today, if you’re presenting your physical ID (for example to confirm your age or your address) you have to share everything — your name, address, your physical description and more. However, with a digital ID, you can share only the required data. Additionally, you must authenticate the device with a fingerprint, PIN or passcode in order for any of your ID information to be shared with the requester.
Built-in privacy: With government-issued digital IDs in Google Wallet today, we use end-to-end encryption between the mobile device where the ID is stored and the issuing party. When saving a government-issued ID to Wallet, Google servers do not see ID information during provisioning and management of the credential. Additionally, we store your data encrypted — which means no one can see or access the ID information unless you authenticate on the phone, ensuring the digital ID can’t be copied and re-used.
We offer these protections to keep identity credentials safe. And even if you lose your phone, you can remotely wipe any digital ID saved to Google Wallet.
Working with governments, regulators and beyond
Bringing digital identity to people everywhere requires support from many different industries. That's why we’re working closely with government agencies, regulators, relying parties and more. Here are the principles we focus on:
Build around standards. Our identity solution is built around industry standards such as those from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which encourage consistency for how IDs are shared between digital wallets and relying parties. The standards help the ecosystem evolve and ensure interoperability between devices, regardless of the company that makes them.
Enable user choice by supporting an open ecosystem. People deserve to choose the digital wallet that’s best for them. Like payments, identity shouldn’t sit in walled gardens. Third parties can build their own identity solution to work on Android thanks to our open-source libraries. And Android and Chrome APIs allow any wallet app to connect to them in order to share to any relying party’s apps and websites. This results in a less burdensome process for relying parties and gives Android users the choice to use their favorite digital wallet.
Google Wallet is available for governments looking to integrate with an existing digital wallet that’s already in use, making it easy for people to quickly access their everyday essential items in one place.
Enabling and accelerating adoption
Digital ID adoption will truly scale when daily use cases like driving a car, picking up prescriptions and more can be done with a digital ID. There’s also a future where digital IDs can be used for things like online tax filing, signing a home loan, opening a bank account or signing up for medical benefits — all from your phone. And the industry is working to make these things happen.
This will take time: Legislation, hardware updates and behavior change don’t happen overnight. We’re working with various parts of the ecosystem — including companies designing hardware for ID acceptance — to speed up in-person adoption. Of course, digital IDs can also be used for identity verification online (for example when renting a car from an app or ordering age-restricted items online), and this is a use case that potentially will scale much faster.
Another way we are working to accelerate the overall awareness, adoption and use of digital IDs is by creating new ways for people to get them. Today we announced a new type of digital ID in Google Wallet which can be created from a U.S. passport, allowing more people to create and save a digital ID even if their state has not yet launched a solution.
Digital IDs are a convenient and helpful tool that also preserve privacy and give people more control over their information. We’re optimistic about the future of digital identity — and collaboration between public and private sectors is ultimately what will help us build a solution that works for everyone.
