Florida’s Senate passed amended House Bill 543 on March 6, advancing a rewritten framework for digital proof of driver’s licenses and identification cards that places unusual emphasis on privacy architecture and verifier behavior. The House had already passed the measure 107-1 on March 4, and the Senate substituted the bill for companion measure SB 1080 before approving it 33-0 and sending it back in messages.
The proposal revises section 322.032 of Florida law and defines digital proof of driver’s license and identification card as electronic credentials that comply with ISO/IEC 18013-5 and 18013-7. The bill says the state must establish a secure optional system and requires explicit consent before a credential is added or its attributes are shared.
The text goes further than a basic rollout bill. Digital credentials must support selective disclosure, be cryptographically verifiable, provide auditability around verification requests and preserve anonymity by preventing transaction linkability. The department would be barred from tracking where a credential user presents a mobile credential or from sharing, storing or selling related information except where law requires it.
Florida also uses the bill to set rules for the verifier side of the ecosystem. Digital driver’s license verifiers must validate authenticity, integrity and issuer attribution offline, without online calls to state or external systems, and may retain only temporary data that is strictly necessary for a transaction. That approach reflects the same privacy-first framing behind Utah’s digital identity bill of rights and ongoing work to broaden mobile driver’s license acceptance across verifier networks.
The bill has not yet become law, but the Senate vote makes Florida one of the more important US testing grounds for privacy-preserving mobile ID rules. Rather than treating mobile ID as a wallet feature alone, lawmakers are writing technical and legal expectations around consent, data minimization and offline verification directly into the proposed framework.
Those details matter because mobile ID policy is increasingly being written around what verifiers are allowed to learn and keep, not just how a credential is displayed on a phone. Florida’s language suggests lawmakers are trying to shape an mDL model that can be widely accepted by businesses and agencies without turning every presentation into a new source of location or behavioral data.
Sources: Florida Senate (HB 543), Bill text
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
