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In Iowa, a Phone App Could Serve As Driver's License
New submitter dubner writes Simply hand the law enforcement officer your mobile phone. That's what you can do in Iowa rather than "digging through clutter in your glove compartment for an insurance card." And soon your driver's license will be available on your phone too, according to a story in the (Des Moines Register). Iowans will soon be able to use a mobile app on their smartphones as their official driver's license issued by the Iowa Department of Transportation. Some marvelous quotes in TFA: "The new app should be highly secure ... People will use a pin number for verification." And "Branstad (Iowa governor)... noted that even Iowa children are now working on digital development projects." A raft of excuses ("battery's dead") and security problems come to mind; how would you implement such a system?
Well, that's one way for the police to get easy access to your phone without a warrant.
One-button download of all personal data for the law enforcement officer's convenience!
Does this sound like a convenient way for Police to have unfettered access to your phone, in light of Riley v. California?
Big brother has made it more convenient for you to always carry the necessary documentation. It's every citizen's duty to make sure they have the necessary papers before they travel.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Unlocking your phone for law enforcement means they can search it.
Simply hand the law enforcement officer your mobile phone.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Among other things it's basically giving them permission to search through my phone if they feel like it. Nope, I'll stick to a physical card.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Bad, BAD idea. How do you ensure the police officer doesn't start rifling through your phone? You GAVE it to him/her, so you must have implicitly consented to their searching your phone.
to upload into a central database while they "check your license". (itsatrap)
Seriously, I'm getting tired of the endless stream of apps.
The world is an app, I have an app, everybody has an app ... it's lots of hype, and very little long-term proven benefit.
I really hope we reach peak app soon, and people STFU about apps.
Yes, fine, you have software. We've had software for decades. But now it's on a phone or a tablet. So it's an app, and it's super awesome, and we need to dedicate countless hours of coverage to it.
And every drooling idiot is racing to ensure they're stuff is available on an app, and telling us how our lives will be improved and perfected by apps, and how if we're not writing an app we'll fall behind and become fossilized.
You know what? Millions of people don't use smart phones, don't use an app for everything, and can conclude our normal bodily functions without relying on an app.
I bet 99.9% of all apps are crap, or won't be around in 5 years. But, like the .com era, you can become a billionaire by saying you have an idea for an app.
Blah blah blah .. take your damned app and get off my lawn.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
After all, most card issued as licenses aren't nearly as secure as Apple Pay or Google Wallet.
He handed me the phone willingly your honor.
And this would be a concern about phone privacy. Because by handing it unlocked with the intent to let them view content, you're basically handing them keys to the castle for any information on you phone. Which is why I'd see this only ever being a secondary option for the forseeable future.
Also, I'd like to see how this could handle when the car was being operated by not the owner. Some sort of temporary driving permission would be pretty cool.
It's definitely a neat idea, but the legal implications are definitely an issue
So you can have them rape your phone and copy everything off with out consent too, right?
"... the new digital license, which he described as "an identity vault app," will be accepted by Iowa law enforcement officers during traffic stops and by security officers screening travelers at Iowa's airports, he said."
Oh good. I'm sure that is 100% secure without any possible problems and has been extensively vetted by third parties...
Seems like James Duane needs to update his lecture to include not handing 128GB of personal information to a cop who is going to take it back to his car to 'verify' it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
-- This sig is only a test. If this were a real sig it would say something witty. --
Amadou Dialo put his hand in his pocket to retrieve his pager and was shot 41 times. A phone these days, is not much larger than an pager was in 1999, and attempting to anticipate a police officer's request for a license could very well make you dead.
Who needs a warrant now. Yes sir I just need to take your "license" back to the police cruiser for a few minutes...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
It's a terrible and impractical idea. There is no need for it, other than app makers and data miners trying to make more money, and the police having a new reason to take your phone. It does not improve on the present system which is already computerized.
But more important, will there soon be laws REQUIRING people to carry a phone?
I gave the officer my phone and he never returned it. Or he broke it while he had it. Etc.. As for privacy, no thanks, not handing a cop my phone. It's never the license I have a hard time finding it's the registration to the car...
when I heard this yesterday my first thought was "How f-ing stupid do you fascist bustards think I am?"
1) Here officer, take my phone which the courts have said I don't have to give you access to without a warrant.
2) Of course the new app will require access to your GPS location 24 hours a day, full access to incoming and outgoing texts, phone calls, email, twitter, contacts, etc.
3) It will run resident in memory and send updates to the central server every 1 minute.
4) You will no longer be able to turn off your phone without government approval.
5) They will never build teh approval request portion of the system.
6) Once deployed, not installing the app will constitute a felony.
7) I'll assume this won't take more than 1 or 2 days to hack and spoof.
IMHO
Fill in the list with anything else you care to add.
Battery is dead is an excuse that'll never fly.
Add an extra bit of code to the drivers licence and it can use your gps to help the police know how fast you were going.
I have given my cell phone with insurance card image to a police officer before. Those things are sent out twice a year, and we have two cars, so ensuring both end up in both wallets in a chore. If I don't produce the card, officer will be less charitable about other circumstances of the stop and I will need to go to courthouse in person to file proof of insurance. I would imagine one's problems would multiply if he/she also forgot the driver license.
Now, this would be an absolutely horrible thing as the only available option, for obvious technical and privacy reasons. And why police does not have a database to get any needed information, complete with photos of all authorized drivers, from license plate/VIN numbers is beyond me.
I think some sort of laminated credit card sized thing with the holder's photo, licence class and serial number might fly in some states.
Yanno, something that doesn't require a battery and can be stowed on the back side of the sunshade so your hands are always visible to a LEO with an itchy trigger finger and a nervous disposition?
ICBW, YMMV, etc.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
It's every citizen's duty to make sure they have the necessary papers before they drive on public roads.
It is called license and insurance (in most places).
I mean really, what the hell is so difficult about keeping your driver's license in your wallet and your registration / insurance card inside something in the glove box?
This is exactly my worry. Say you choose to comply. How can you safely produce your phone? "All my information is on my phone, officer. May I put my hand in my pocket to retrieve it?" Even that may not work in the absence of properly curated incident recordings.
People will still be able to stick a traditional plastic driver's license in their wallet or purse if they choose
Unlocked cant be the primary reason for pulling someone over in my state. But the cop can add it to a ticket for something else. So they could check if you been texting in the previous five minutes while driving then.
Either as a part of someones service, or general rant apps.
The Supreme Court over there recently ruled that warrantless searches on mobiles belonging to arrestees are legal. If you refuse to hand over your phone/licence in CA because of whatever's on your phone or because you fear the privacy boogeyman, they'll just arrest you and use the precedent to search your phone anyway.
I said this shit was coming. I said it fucking years ago, even before contactless payments with iOS and RFID chips embedded in handsets.
So fucking glad I don't have a working phone.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
A "license" isn't a thing--it's a right or privilege to do or not do something. The State keeps a complete record of you and the scope of your driving license at the Department of Licensing. All they need is a fingerprint, or maybe even optical recognition of your face, and they can access that data from their patrol car.
An "app" as a "license" is just as archaic as a paper license today.
Here officer, just take my phone, and while you're at it feel free to copy its contents to your mobile scraper.
If you voluntarily hand your phone, unlocked, to a cop, you are just BEGGING for trouble. Fuck no.
Don't the police have computers? Can't they just query the DMV themselves? Maybe I need to sell an app that displays a fake ID on your phone if this is what they depend on.
A proper implementation should be by the OS maker, though, which automatically locks the phone when the app is accessed - or in which the license/insurance/registration information can only be accessed from the home screen via a special unlock code/access which does not unlock the rest of the phone contents.
While a super-secure app isn't really necessary for police, since they can just call in your license number and verify you're legal/in the system, for things like age verification, you'd have to add some kind of simple challenge/response functionality for people who don't have access to police records (bouncers, cashiers, bartenders).
Not that it matters. Until Apple/Google get the whole NFC payment bullshit worked out and every vendor has an NFC terminal we're going to be carrying around other slabs of plastic to pay for things. Carrying a license isn't really an extra burden.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Like many apps, the Driver's License app will probably require access to your SMSes, phone call record, contacts, calendar, location, and photos for no good reason at all. You'll also need to wait in a queue for a few minutes to view your driver's license, but you can use an in-app purchase to skip the line.
Why would we need either these days? The gov already has an electronic record of my drivers license and photo. Why is it necessary that I carry one around? I get pulled over, tell them my name and they can pull up my file on the patrolman's computer (in car/tablet/whatever) and verify it's me. It's not like the card is my actual drivers license anymore, it's the computer record. The card just made it easy to verify my identity before we had pervasive computer networks.
I get that the cop can easily verify it, all he needs is your ID number and he can look you up. So there really is no need to hand him anything. But I don't see how one would make this app secure or usable as a form of ID for buying alcohol or getting entry into bar.
Hell, they don't even need to pull me over to search my phone. What could possibly go wrong?
Get your license ID and social security number tattooed on your head so you don't have to fumble around looking for your smart phone or if it's charged or not
.. what does Bennet Hasselfoff have to say about this?
Yes Bennett please continue to contribute frequently!!!
Add weak biometry so that when it is hacked/stolen, not only does the iPhone thief have the phone, but they have bank-cards, and the weak biometry that would allow ongoing identity theft even in a biometry protected ecosystem.
Add today's version of substandard encryption with the justification that it has to run on even old processors. This means that tomorrow, when the upgrades are complex and expensive, they have the politically expedient statement assuring budget deciders that what exists is sufficient even while the reality is that it is highly permeable, and easily foiled.
Allow integration with other apps, like the bank account, the credit cards, and even the license/title of the car. That way when the thief steals the phone, they can steal the entire net worth and future of the individual.
PS: this is what NOT TO DO.
This seems to be a way to get your cell phone out of your hand and into the hands of the police, without a warrant, and your permission.
SCOTUS recently ruled that the police can't search your phone without your permission, absent a warrant. Now you get pulled over, and you have to hand your unlocked cell phone to the nice police officer, while he leaves your site and goes to his car for 5 minutes or so.
Now he has the opportunity to see what else you might have on your phone.
As a bonus, since he has your phone, you can't use it to record your interaction with him.
What is wrong with the piece of plastic in my wallet? It has worked well for a long time. If my State offered it, I might add it to my phone for fun, but I would still have the wallet card to give to a police officer.
Why it is a burden of the tax payer not only to pay taxes, which are used for the systems for human and property databases, but, also, burdened with the need to have the old copy of the database record?
Papers are the relict from medieval and industrial, pre-computer and internet era.
Currently one only needs to identify himself and that should be enough data for any cop to pull all the databases and photos of the individual that is being detained.
Somehow it is always the additional burden on the taxpayers that are always imposed and very rarely, if ever, bureaucratic requirements are eliminated.
Abolish plastic driver's license ID, paper insurance and paper registration.
And this differs from existing fake licences how?
I've got a good idea for implementing this. You install the app on your phone. Go to your local DMV, go through standard verification process, and they will hand you a pre-printed access card for your app. This card contains all necessary authentication to access your license. When needed, you can hand over the access card, and the authorities can use the data on the card to access your profile as needed.
The best part? You can actually skip the step of installing the app on your phone. All you really need is the access card.
" A raft of excuses ('battery's dead')..."
No problem, the officer will charge your phone long enough to produce the license app. Possibly with his taser...
I'd prefer a card and electronic version with name, photo and QR Code (with human-readable number below) that an officer could scan or type in could link to the appropriate government database that has all the rest of the info. The user could choose which to present.
There's no reason to have a document with your address and phone number to permit driving or function as ID. Every cop car I see has a laptop and wireless access. Easy to look-up and verify.
We'd have to figure out how to let legitimate 3rd parties (e.g., banks, employers) access the db securely without the ability to access too much information. Still, even if we gave them full access to address and phone details it's no worse than the current situation and better in many.
The comments here seem to focus on the situation that by giving your unlocked phone to a cop so he/she can see the driver's license will allow the cop to get everything on the phone. One other purpose may be to see where you've been. This may occur if the Driver's License app makes use of the GPS system on the phone so that it records your itinerary and your speed. Could you then become a suspect in a crime because you were someplace where a crime was committed even if you were totally innocent? You might also get a speeding ticket for speeding a long time before the cop stopped you or could even have measured your speed.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
Don't the police have computers? Can't they just query the DMV themselves?
That is the point I keep coming back to... the idea of a picture ID or any paperwork that you carry with you comes from a time when we didn't have networked computers with access to real time information. It seems reasonable that we could just eliminate having to carry around physical IDs altogether (at least as a requirement of the law) and have the police taking pictures and/or typing in a name to verify someone's identity.
Facial recognition could be used to make the look-ups faster and more accurate. And most drivers are associated with one or two vehicles, so the police could have someone's picture up before they even approach the driver in most cases.
At some point relying on the information provided by a picture ID just isn't reliable and has always been prone to being faked. Much better to just check the picture stored by the DMV than to trust a picture on an ID. Sure the network can go down, but that really should be the exception and we can probably think of a better fallback than a piece of plastic with your name and an old picture on it.
Simply hand the law enforcement officer your mobile phone.
*forehead slap* how stupid can you be, officer walks back to his car plugs in Apple approved reading device and copies phone content, contacts etc, oh yes your "encryption" you trust a company that let "goto fail" slip through...
Idiots.
Now your "phone" is your wallet, your drivers license, your social life and you are completely owned, and dissected by the corporations in a way the often feared "666" tattoo or "chip implant" could never have done.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
When, in the process of handing your phone over, it gets dropped from at least the height of the bottom of your car window and falls onto the pavement/concrete, who's responsible? What if the phone then bounces and/or slides into traffic where its run over? Who's going to believe your word that the cop fumbled and dropped it? And even if the cop admits at least partial responsibility, is that going to help pay for repairs or an entirely new phone?
At the movie theatre when the teenager behind the counter wants to take my phone to scan the loyalty code I politely decline, saying "I'll hold it thanks. And, by the way, my personal recommendation is that you don't take on the risk of touching any customer's phone. Because if its dropped in the transfer, isn't the customer always right?" I've yet too see the "oh yeah" light go on in any of their eyes, but I keep trying.
It's time to go Tyler Durden.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
HAHAHAHA. No.
Have you not been paying attention?
The cop will shoot you dead while you are reaching for your cell phone....
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Facial recognition could be used to make the look-ups faster and more accurate. And most drivers are associated with one or two vehicles, so the police could have someone's picture up before they even approach the driver in most cases.
With a driver license, it's really _you_ who will be trying to convince the police officer that you have a valid license. So facial recognition isn't really needed. You're right, most of the time a police officer taking a photo of your license plate could automatically be shown photos of one or sometimes two people who are most likely driving the car and are in the system as having a license or as having no license.
If nothing comes up or the driver doesn't meet the pictures, the driver would need to give the police officer information that leads to the license. Typically name and birthday, or address, or even license number if you learned it by heart and don't want to give your name. Then same thing, the information is looked up and a picture shown to the police officer.
Problem would be if you lost your license and gave your twin brother's information. Knowing that information is probably much easier than stealing his driving license.
I cannot imagine a circumstance where I would voluntarily hand my cellphone to a cop. I'd be FAR more likely to hide my cellphone and tell the cop I don't have one. They're far too eager to search them.
In the UK, you don't even need to carry any driver's license with you. Much more civilised.
....guess you don't have your license (same as if you forgot your wallet at home).
personal problem. enjoy your ticket.
What is really amazing, and just freeking audacious to say the least, is how the IDOT is even considering doing this.
With all the recent focus on digital privacy, etc, especially since the "outing" of the NSA via Snowden, with the protests against police brutality a la Ferguson, etc, it just amazes me that something like this would even be considered. Amazing.
Who in their right mind would hand their unlocked cell phone to law enforcement?
The reality is, they are always looking for something, anything, any scrap of information, or anything misconstrued or misinterpreted, to be USED AGAINST YOU.
People keep forgetting, it doesn't matter if you haven't done anything wrong or not. That doesn't matter and never did. There are loads of Americans out there who have been "put through the ringer"(putting it mildly) by LE who were honest people who never did anything wrong.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
I don't know, but I'm sure a dozen lolbertards will be along any minute to explain why it's equivalent to socialised medicine and death panels.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
What problem is this technology suppose to solve again? Do we have a use case?
Offer drivers low-cost or free phone cases with space to hold their driver's license on the back. Driver pulls their phone out of their pocket (it's likely more accessible than their wallet) and shows/hands the back of the phone to the officer.
Offer drivers a holder that attaches via suction cups or similar mechanism to their dashboard. Find some way (driver's license doubles as an EZPass? Cops have a scanner that lets them bring up the driver's information more quickly when they stop a motorist, rather than having to take it back to their vehicle?) to encourage drivers to put their licenses in that holder while they're driving.
The privacy and security considerations are strong arguments against turning the driver's license into an app or something similar. But if they really want a high-tech solution, working with phone manufacturers to create a lock screen app (open source, to reduce the chances of a back door) that allows a police officer to enter a code (which gets logged on the phone manufacturer's servers and should be able to be associated with the individual officer) into the lock screen to display JUST the license info, not actually unlock the phone. This would also be useful if a phone is lost, stolen, or used as part of a crime; it would allow the police to identify the owner.
"You look a lot younger in person, <Insert Name of Famous Celebrity>, and you also look more like a <Insert Opposite Gender>, but who am I to argue with a valid license? Enjoy your beer!"
Granted, it could be loosely inferred / deduced based on other relateable elements.
Additionally, as states are not required to share DMV records, or at least I don't think they are, lost my train of thought... Something relational data missing content, etc.
compared to something inside the vehicle, locked possibly twice, with no means of digital nor of remote access. oh, and breaking into a car is very illegal. stealing a car even more so.
I worked on that product for 9 months!
Great to see it come to reality!
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Reportage of the decision here:
http://www.thestar.com/news/ca...
The real question to me is whether this means that a Canadian cop, once (s)he's arrested me, for some whatever infraction (running a burnt out light) could then force me to unlock my phone so (s)he can rife through it.
If so, the Canadian police state is more fully formed than in the US.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
many years ago in my single days I was WALKING home from a bar on new year's eve (technically day) and was stopped/harassed by a local cop. when I made a slight shiver (did I mention it was 01:00-ish new year's day?) he looked at me & said: "it's warm in the back of the car if you want to warm up while I run this". he claimed I took off running when I saw him (I was lightly jogging b/c it was COLD & I only lived a few blocks down street but I never turned around & looked back - prick!)
that was the day I had my "cop rule" epiphany: no good can ever come from interacting w/a cop - the best you can do is break even/waste your time and the scenarios go downhill from there in a hurry... they're a necessary evil & still the lesser of but the trend line is moving in the wrong direction...
....when our OS on the phone allows locked apps that can't exit to anything else, then and only then would something like this be useful. I don't even like letting people use my phone to make calls (rare as that occurance is) because they could look through my phone if they felt like it. Maybe make the first screen unlockable and anything past the first screen requiring yet another unlocking and you can choose what you want to put on that first screen. Always thought this too when handing a kid the phone to play with for a bit, best to keep things locked down to one app or something. I'm sure there's an implentation somewhere for it already, just needs to be more widely available.
Yes, but it isn't reliable. There are plenty of locations that don't have adequate cellular data service.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
The FAA has been trying to point out this fact for decades. The paper pilots carry around isn't a pilots license, it is a certificate of license. The license is held in a computer somewhere and when that is revoked, the paper saying you have a license is meaningless.
around here, police verifies all data you give them (licence, vehicle registration, insurance) with the hq. if they can't communicate, they are not allowed to perform any of those checks (and i think the internal guidelines say that they must "return to base" or something like that)
Rich
Yes, police will verify through dispatch even if they do not have data service available. Depending on your jurisdiction they probably have different rules as to whether the officer must release the suspect. Where I live, a traffic stop is legally equivalent to an arrest and I wouldn't be surprised if the officer would make an educated decision on bringing the suspect in until at least the officer can contact dispatch.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
No thanks.
Having a drivers licence on your phone sounds good.
If people can't produce it then logically Police should have on their phones/tablets/computers a database which has your drivers licence. They just ask you for your full name, date of birth, and address and it matches it.
Here in Australia if you don't have your licence on you when you are stopped by a police officer then my understanding is that they take down your details and give you 24 hours to report with it to a police station.
Other than everything ...
Wisconsin does. I found that out when i got pulled over for having an expired license (license not tags). i managed to forget to renew it and the plate scanner flagged that the registered owners license was expired.
Now they can dump your phone when they pull you over..
It seems reasonable that we could just eliminate having to carry around physical IDs altogether (at least as a requirement of the law) and have the police taking pictures and/or typing in a name to verify someone's identity.
Neat idea but it misses a lot of practical problems.
Many police cars are equipped with cameras that can read via OCR your license plate (called "Automated License Plate Recognition" or ALPR) and check against a database to see if your car has been reported stolen, is reported in an Amber Alert, etc.
However, the person driving the car is a totally different issue. Let's assume that there's no requirement that you have a personal driver's license.
The officer pulls you over for speeding and he/she says, "name please?" You say "Oliver Klozoff." Without that government-issued ID you can make up any darn name you want to. That officer has no way to get you to produce your real name, even if it is Osama bin Laden and you're driving around the country touring Whataburger locations. Oliver Klozoff isn't an owner of that car? Well, your friend lent it to you for the afternoon, what's wrong with that? So without the fact that driving without a physical license is a crime, the cop has no way to figure out if you are a wanted person or not. Not a great thing for catching wanted people (see Timothy McVeigh and his traffic stop arrest after the Oklahoma City bombing for example).
On the flip side of civil liberties - the officer pulls you over for speeding and he/she takes your picture and runs it against a visual database stored by the DMV. Unfortunately, because it's nighttime and lit only by the officer's flashlight, and you grew a beard since you had your driver's license photo taken and put on some weight, you are no longer recognized as a valid driver in your state. Why not arrest you just to be sure?
You get the idea. Think of a driver's license like a form of two-factor authentication. It's not the physical card itself which is important so much as that it is a token which only you are supposed to have, which links you back to a known set of credentials at the state level which can be attached to a permission to drive, a known wants/warrants record, or so on and so forth. Just like how your physical passport isn't what is important when you enter the country - it's just a good way to get started when they scan it into a database where the real information is stored that can figure out who you are.
"95% of all Slashdot
Florida does. You need a valid license to get the registration, and the computer system is very, very good at managing data. I had to get a new license the other day, and it took under fifteen minutes total, from walking in the door to walking out with the license. Efficient as fuck. Give them any one selector (SSN, address, name, whatever) and the clerk can tell you everything they have about you, from your driving record to your registrations to the vision restrictions on your license to your organ donor status. This information includes your date of birth, SSN, and your insurance company. It's all tied together in one system.
Also, Florida has the "Sunshine Law." All public records except FERPA/HIPAA data are made available to the public for a nominal fee. That means that the DMV/Tax Collector's Office sells its *entire* database (sans SSN, apparently) to marketers. As soon as you get a license or a new car registration, you start getting junk mail.
Oh HE (double hockey sticks) no am I giving my phone to anyone!
On the first issue. Having a database association between a car registration and known or even likely drivers is a relatively trivial exercise in associating different databases... namely car registrations and licenses. Shared address would be the simplest way to associate cars and possible drivers. But that would clearly not be 100% reliable, so it would be merely a convenience for the police so they don't have to manually enter information for writing up a ticket or checking for outstanding warrants. Actually, it could be of added benefit because it could end up bringing up information on other household members who may very well be in the car at the time.
The only concern about making up a name that would be valid is if the courts saw making up a name or withholding your name as a valid exercise of your first or 5th amendment rights. Otherwise you could simply make it a requirement for drivers to give their real legal name to police and it would be practically no different than presenting a fake ID or refusing to give your ID to the police. And the benefit is that such a system would eliminate the possibility of people getting cited for driving without a license just for forgetting their license at home. It is a real shame that in most states the system has made forgetfulness a misdemeanor. I know that I have left my wallet at home probably half a dozen or maybe a dozen times over many years and driven my car, thankfully never got caught.
As for the ID being a convenient way to get started for looking up someone's data. I don't dispute that. Especially, for all those scenarios where someone has a hard to spell name or like you mention a hard to facially recognize face. Having a card with a name, picture and bar code on it makes some sense. And there are many many somewhat artificial reasons that having a physical ID makes sense. Like access to Federal facilities requiring a REAL ID compliant state issued picture ID. So I wouldn't argue for a wholesale overnight change. But I do have a concern that most states have laws on the books that make a simple and reasonable act of forgetfullness a misdemeanor crime.
I think what I would suggest as way to make the law less unnecessarily onerous would simply be to allow people to avoid an additional citation for driving without a license if the police can verify your identity via other means and can verify that you do have a license to drive. So simply eliminate the misdemeanor for those who have merely forgotten their licenses as long as the police system is working.
Most people live where their car is registered. And most commonly it is household members that might be driving that car. So address is a pretty solid way to associate the data. No not 100%., but that wasn't the point. It was merely a convenience for police to be able to bring up the record of someone more quickly based on the car registration.
Name or Name and address should be more than sufficient 99% of the time to bring up the records for an in-state driver.
As for out of state drivers... states have to determine reciprocity for a variety of licensing, so that isn't a new problem.
Or walk down the street. Or be brown in the wrong part of town.