Calvin Fabre - Envoc's Role in Pioneering Mobile Driver’s Licenses in Louisiana

In this episode, I’m joined by Calvin Fabre, President and Founder of Envoc, a company that has been at the heart of mobile driver’s license (mDL) innovation in Louisiana, a state leading the nation in mDL adoption. Calvin shares the fascinating story of how his company helped bring the country’s first digital driver’s license into reality, starting with a simple idea for a “digital glove box.”
We dive into a variety of topics, including:

• The journey from bidding on payment processing systems to developing a groundbreaking MDL system for the Louisiana DMV

• How Envoc navigated the complexities of legislation and law enforcement adoption to make digital driver’s licenses legal for routine traffic stops

• The importance of user feedback in expanding the LA Wallet app to include hunting licenses, concealed carry permits, and even COVID-19 vaccine cards

• The unique role LA Wallet has played in verifying identity remotely, including for disaster relief and online age verification for adult content

• Insights on the future of digital credentials, from frictionless onboarding to the growing adoption of MDLs in industries like banking and retail

Calvin’s expertise offers a deep dive into the future of identity and digital credentials, making this episode a must-listen for anyone interested in the intersection of technology, law enforcement, and secure digital identification.
You can learn more about Envoc at envoc.com.
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Reach out to Riley (@rileyphughes) and Trinsic (@trinsic_id) on Twitter. We’d love to hear from you.

Full Transcript

Transcript lightly edited for clarity.

Riley Hughes: Welcome to the Future of Identity podcast, where we talk to the people building the ID tech products of tomorrow. I’m Riley Hughes, co-founder of Trinsic, and I’m here with Calvin Fabre, president and founder of Envoc. Calvin, welcome to the podcast.

Calvin Fabre: What a great podcast to be on. Thanks for having me.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, thanks a lot. I think basically all of our listeners to this podcast are really interested in mobile driver’s licenses, and Louisiana is a state with, I think, the most mDL adoption in the United States on a percentage basis, perhaps even an absolute basis. And so I’m excited that I get to talk to somebody who’s been at the center of this. So let me start by asking: can you orient our listeners on how you ended up at the center of this and what your role has been in the mDL project in Louisiana?

Calvin Fabre: Sure. Louisiana puts out requests for proposals. At the time that this RFP went out, we were bidding on a payment processing, bringing credit cards to the DMVs instead of everyone using cash. And Louisiana asks for an innovative concepts response area. In that part of the response, this is when mobile proliferation started happening back in 2015, and we said, why don’t we have a digital glove box where we can add your credentials of your driver’s license and registration into an app? And we, long story short, we won the RFP, and then we just forgot about it. And the state came back and said, Hey, you need to make good on that digital driver’s license idea.

Riley Hughes: Oh, nice.

Calvin Fabre: So the state was really visionary because they took the steps of passing legislation to make this digital driver’s license legal. For all traffic stops on day one. And that was a huge feather in the cap of the state. Every law enforcement officer on day one got a message in their private communication area that said, Here’s the new thing. You will now accept a digital driver’s license effective in 20, I think it was 2018.

Riley Hughes: What were the sort of players and roles in the process? You mentioned that you responded to this RFP for the DMV, but I also noticed in the LA Wallet there are credentials of all different kinds, and so I assume it became more of a state-level priority. And you mentioned legislation. So what was the early timeline like from the moment you put in the RFP until things started going live? What happened in between those two points in time?

Calvin Fabre: Sure. There was probably an eight-month development period where we learned a lot about Apple’s restrictions and Google’s non-restrictions in developing the app. Along the way, as we were developing the app, we would get in front of the state police, for example. And the state police, we would show them a new feature and we’d say, Look, you can click right here and you can check their ID and make sure it’s valid. And the first thing they said is, We will never touch their phone. And I said, What do you mean? You can get everything right here. It’s all right there. And they said, We will never touch their phone. Go figure something else out. And we were going, Oh my gosh, did we just write the wrong thing? And they started to explain. They said, The minute I touch someone’s phone as a law enforcement officer, they’re going to accuse me of going through their personal effects, their personal files. They’re going to accuse me of cracking their screen. And we’re just not going to touch their phone if you’re going to ask us to accept this. And we were like, Wow, we didn’t think of that.

Calvin Fabre: That’s a great idea. So it was great that the Department of Public Safety here in Louisiana has that kind of relationship with law enforcement to bring them all into a room and say, Hey, this is what we’re thinking. We’re thinking of doing this. What do you think? And then we also had the head of Alcohol Tobacco Control, the ones that issue licenses to bartenders or people that deal with alcohol age-related purchases. They’re in the room too, and they’re saying, Look, we need to know how to spot a fake one of these, because we know how to spot a fake plastic credential, but we also need to know how to spot this. If it’s legal, everyone’s going to be asking, Why can’t I use it at a bar? Why can’t I use it at a restaurant or a grocery store? So all of these different relying parties at the state level got involved and contributed to the policies and some legislation to make it widely adopted in Louisiana.

Riley Hughes: That’s really interesting. Adoption is really the crux of all identity systems, particularly reusable ID or mobile driver’s licenses or, you know, any identity wallet type of concept. You always have this chicken and egg of, you know, you can get credentials into the wallet, but then where do people use them? And, you know, if there’s nowhere to use them, why would anybody put anything into the wallet, right? And so it sounds like the first use case that overcame that chicken-and-egg problem was law enforcement. Is that right? Was law enforcement the first use case?

Calvin Fabre: It is law enforcement, yeah. Yeah, so in law enforcement, they were the first use case. Now we did have to begin creating documentation, documents and acceptance guidelines that would be presented and taught during the cadet education process of all the law enforcement officers in the state. And likewise, the Alcohol Tobacco or Beverage Control group also got the guideline on how to accept and how to use this digital driver’s license, this brand new thing. And again, we have a no-touch policy. You cannot handle the phone. Now, another big thing is the friction. Now, this was before the ISO 18013-5 mobile driver’s license standard. We were still contributing whether that was part of this initial version or not. Yeah, it was in draft, and the state asked us to participate on that board. I’m still on the ISO committee there contributing to the standards. But this was before the standard was released. In Louisiana, we have hurricanes, and one of the coolest… use cases we did was to remotely verify people using LA Wallet for disaster relief benefits.

Calvin Fabre: So we did the first remote identity verification that the state came to us and said, Hey, we got about a million people on this thing. How can we verify their identity remotely and get them their benefits and prove their identity ahead of this hurricane? And it won an award for that. It’s one of my favorite use cases. But the adoption, we have to point out that it came out before the mDL standard, Louisiana did, so we went rogue in that sense. But we learned a lot about the use cases, good and bad. And with the mDL standard, it is an amazing standard. It is a high assurance. Okay, if you imagine a graph, and assurance is on the x-axis going from left to right, how much assurance do you need? And so when you’re going into a restaurant and the law says you need to verify someone’s ID, the assurance, you know, I mean, I look over 18, so do you, but that assurance doesn’t have to be really high. I’m not going to take your driver’s license and go run it on a criminal justice information system. I’m not going to ask a police officer to run a background check on you.

Calvin Fabre: So the friction of checking for that assurance is very low. The assurance that an mDL gives, because of how complicated and how verified and how it’s stamped with a digital certificate from the issuing state, it’s onboarded onto your device with a selfie and a liveness check. There’s a lot of friction to get an mDL on a device. So it’s my personal view that because Louisiana went with what’s called the Flash Pass, or a digital reproduction of your physical credential, and you can get that on a low-friction transaction onto your device quickly, that fed the adoption that Louisiana has. So we were able to get your driver’s license into your app much faster than the process it takes to onboard an mDL.

Riley Hughes: Interesting. Okay. I really, I want to put a pin in that because I want to dig into that point a little bit deeper, because I think that’s a really interesting insight. But before we get away from just the beginning times, I want to make sure I have this timeline right and make sure that I’m able to get the full picture of the story of how this came to be where it is today. Did the LA Wallet, which is the app on the phone, right? Did the LA Wallet exist first for things like hunting licenses and fishing licenses and concealed carry permits, and then the state had you sort of issue an mDL into an existing thing, or was the mDL the first credential inside the LA Wallet, and then later people thought, oh, let’s put some other things inside this to piggyback on the verified ID, which is the mDL? Does that make sense?

Calvin Fabre: Yes. The first credential in LA Wallet was the digital driver’s license. Now, immediately when we put the app out into the wild, we established a user feedback suggestion website, and it’s still up today. And we let all of the residents go to the website and suggest the next set of features. And they would say, hey, y’all, I want my wallet, my digital driver’s license in Apple Wallet, or I want my wildlife and fisheries license in there. I want my vehicle registration. I want state IDs in there, because we didn’t support state IDs at first. So we let the residents decide what were the next features, and we would go in there and clean them up, and they would upvote them. So the very first, the next feature everyone asked for was hunting and fishing licenses, because we don’t want to carry—we’re a big hunting state here in Louisiana. And usually it’s the people that were very resistant to the government tracking them with a digital driver’s license. There was a lot of skepticism with that.

Calvin Fabre: But once we said, We are going to put your hunting and fishing licenses, a whole new demographic of people were excited about getting LA Wallet because now they could put their hunting and fishing licenses on there, and their deer tags, and their turkey tags, and you can put tags on there during certain seasons. And the group that was crying about the privacy immediately said, Wait a minute, I want my concealed carry handgun permit on there now.

Riley Hughes: Sure.

Calvin Fabre: We were asking the state to put those on there, and then we did eventually add concealed handgun permits. So it was an amazing turn of events once everyone saw the benefit of carrying their digital credentials in their phone. We like to say that when you forget your wallet at home, you sometimes don’t turn your car around and go back and get it. But if you forget your phone, you’ll turn a plane around to go get your phone if you left it.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, it’s funny. And any of my close friends knows that the statement you made about wallets being left home is very true. There’s been a handful of times where I have ruined a good night out because I didn’t have my ID on me. But yeah, totally agree. Don’t turn the car around to get the wallet. Definitely do it for the phone. And your last comment there was a really good segue into where I wanted to go next, because one of the things I really wanted to get out of this conversation is I wanted to understand whether… Like, how adoption occurs mechanistically, right? Is it occurring one step at a time through new use cases and relying parties and whatever, or is there this sort of inevitability where once the mDL is available, it just is going to grow in adoption organically because people will realize, oh, I can get this on my phone. Okay, great, and then they go download it.

Riley Hughes: So I wonder if you could describe whether adoption occurred, and as best as you can recall, right, in terms of, like, step functions where at first you had law enforcement and a certain amount of— people got it, and then it was available to use in the TSA, and now a bunch of travelers got the digital driver’s license. And then it was available for hunting and fishing licenses, and then the next cohort got it, right? And it was a stepwise adoption, or whether it was more smooth and linear, or maybe not linear, but smooth and slowly exponential over time. Does that make sense?

Calvin Fabre: Yeah, there were a few milestones that drove adoption. The first one, of course, was the initial one, which makes it legal to carry in place of your driver’s license because Louisiana passed the legislation for law enforcement. Now that makes it legal only for traffic stops, for routine traffic stops. So if you’re committing a felony, or you’re driving over 30 miles an hour over the speed limit, or you get a DUI, you have to produce the plastic even today in the state of Louisiana. So it’s not a complete replacement. But for children, for parents that have 16-year-old kids that just started driving, get your license on LA Wallet. All the driving schools are saying, okay, download LA Wallet right now and put your tip card in there, put your ID in there right away. Everybody do that. So I think you have a really good app when you feel like you’re doing someone else a favor by telling them about the app. And that’s what we had with LA Wallet in that first initial adoption phase.

Calvin Fabre: Now we did everything we could to not drive adoption because we were charging $5.99 for every onboarded license.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, and keep in mind that since that’s a purely digital credential, Apple and Google will take their customary 30 percent of that.

Calvin Fabre: Yep.

Riley Hughes: So keep an eye on that one.

Calvin Fabre: But during COVID, which is another anomalous event, the state asked us to onboard a digital vaccine card for the COVID-19 vaccine. And that drove adoption through the roof. Number one, we made it free because we were in a pandemic. And number two, you could prove your vaccination status by showing a smart health card. And we worked with the Commons Project, but they engineered and created this smart health card format for the—it’s basically a QR code that’s digitally signed. And we integrated into the state’s IIS, the Immunization Information System. That required a whole lot of security and HIPAA compliance and just lots of rules there. But we were able to deploy that. We have 860,000 of the smart health cards. It was quite successful in its deployment. But that drove adoption a lot for LA Wallet, and that gave it more and more credibility with the state. And then again, that user suggestion website starts to fill up with more and more users. We added the ability to become an organ donor in the app.

Riley Hughes: Oh, interesting. That’s really cool.

Calvin Fabre: I don’t really think about giving away parts of my body when I’m at the DMV waiting for a long time. I’m in a bad mood to make that decision. No, I’m not giving my body. But now that I’m playing around with LA Wallet and I can say, yeah, I think I’ll become a donor right here. And we’ve signed up thousands of people in LA Wallet, thousands new organ donors just by having the app. You know, in your hand. So that drove a lot of adoption. And then we added the ability to renew your driver’s license or order a duplicate in the app itself. So if you lost your plastic, you could use the app and order a new plastic credential, and that would be printed and shipped to your address on file. Now, one caveat there: Apple and Google don’t take the 30% on that, on the renewals, because you’re actually getting a physical product.

Riley Hughes: Yeah. So that’s an important—

Calvin Fabre: Yeah. Yeah, we learned a lot about licensing and fees and things.

Riley Hughes: Sure. Yeah. Yeah, this is really interesting. So another way to think about how something gets adopted is whether it is adopted by the issuers, or in other words, pushed down by the issuers, or if it is driven by a relying party need, or in other words, a user approaches a relying party, bumps up against a situation where they need the digital driver’s license, and then goes and gets it because of a need for something that they need to do. It sounds like most of the adoption of LA Wallet has been, and I don’t know if this is the proper framing, so you can correct me here, but it sounds like most of it has been issuer-driven in the sense that as a user, I want a certain credential, digital, let me go get it, as opposed to I’m in a traffic stop, oh, I need to go get my thing, or I’m trying to get into a bar, I need to get my thing, or I’m trying to get through the TSA, I need to get my thing. Is that a proper kind of way to think about it?

Calvin Fabre: Yes. Yes, so the relying parties are influenced more by the credential holders than they are by the laws that say you have to take them. In fact, a lot of people would call our help desk and say, I’m here at CVS trying to pick up my prescription, and they’re not accepting LA Wallet.

Riley Hughes: Yeah. But it’s legal. It’s a legal credential, so…

Calvin Fabre: The outcry came from the holders as the number of holders became increasingly, you know, numerous. They would go and say, What are you talking about? Haven’t you heard about this? So once again, legislation can be passed, which we did in Louisiana, to make LA Wallet equal to the digital, equal to the plastic credential, right, with a few exceptions. The finance, banking industries, they love to take your plastic credential and throw it on a copy machine and front and back it because that’s just what they’ve always done. Their processes won’t keep up with a digital driver’s license. In fact, we had a title company call us and say, You know, I’m putting— the phone on my copy machine and it’s not copying. I’m like, No, that’s not going to work.

Riley Hughes: That’s hilarious.

Calvin Fabre: Yeah. But yeah, once the outcry came, the legislature passed that equivalence law here in Louisiana that makes it, with a few exceptions, equivalent to the plastic credential. And now CVS and Walmart and other places have to accept it by law.

Riley Hughes: Interesting. Yeah, so I want to, about another scenario where you could imagine something being relying party driven, which is also related to the state requirements that you mentioned. There’s been quite a bit of news in the last maybe 12 months or so about online age verification for adult content. And in the state I live in, which is Utah, laws have been passed, and certain major adult content websites have simply pulled out of Utah and said, We won’t serve that geography. And in Louisiana, it’s my understanding that there’s a requirement that users use mobile driver’s license to prove their age to access this type of content. And maybe you can add nuance to that, but I wonder, was that another driver of adoption, right? You hear about early internet adoption being driven by age verification or by adult content, and I wonder if age verification will be a driver of digital credentials, or if you saw a major uptick in either adoption in terms of raw numbers or adoption in terms of usage and frequency of usage of the credentials, if you have such metrics.

Calvin Fabre: Yes, that is a complicated topic, but one that we did address and are uniquely addressing here in Louisiana. Representative Lori Schlegel passed HB House Bill 142. In 2022, making any publisher of adult content responsible for age challenging that visitor. Now, that visitor, there’s also some nuances to the law in the sense that whoever is doing the age challenge of that person that’s visiting for the adult content cannot store who visited or what site they visited. Okay, so trust us, it’s in the law. But as an age verification person or company, like what we do, we are bound by law not to record who or what site was being visited. Yes, we do use LA Wallet’s remote verification for that. And again, this came out before the 18.013-7 remote standard, which can do these sort of things. And the only thing that we can check for is what’s called coarse age. So we don’t transmit someone’s date of birth anywhere to verify something.

Calvin Fabre: The way it works is the system detects that a visitor from Louisiana, the actual publisher of the content, will detect through their means that this is a visitor from Louisiana. They will pop up a dialog that says, This is your age challenge. Right now, the only means to age verify is to open up LA Wallet and put in this four-digit—it’s basically a two-factor authentication code that lasts for five minutes. So they put that code in, and in Louisiana, we always have a permissive mindset. So I’m going to put up a dialog that says, This website is requesting access to view your coarse age. That means over 18, under 18, over 21, for the purpose of accessing adult-level content. And if you say yes, the only thing they get is over 21 or under 18. That’s all they get. And we might have a session ID, some unique GUID that they gave us in order to track the fact that we actually issued that challenge. But we have no idea who it is. We have no— we do not record it. Now, did adoption increase pending the passage of that law? Yes, it did, by a factor of about 3x.

Calvin Fabre: Nikki Davidson from GovTech wrote an article on this called, and I think it addresses your state, Can states without digital IDs manage age verification laws? It’s a very thorough article. It’s one of the best ones I’ve seen. And it talks about the successes and the nuances that we’ve had with LA Wallet and the digital credentials. To date, since 2023, we’ve performed over 3 million age verification, age challenges, and about 0.8% of those were denying underage viewers.

Riley Hughes: Oh, interesting. I’m guessing that underage viewers in general will, if they see that dialogue, that’s enough of a deterrent, right?

Calvin Fabre: It’s, I think it’s a deterrent on a number of fronts, honestly. I think that there’s going to be some social experiments that say, what percentage of these actually completed? Did this age challenge give people pause? for what they were thinking. But for me, I like protecting the privacy of adults. I don’t—if there’s nothing stored on our side, there’s nothing to breach, and I’m a big fan of that.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, so I appreciate the explanation that you gave, which is very good about what do the publishers get, what do you retain, all of that, which is very little overall. You mentioned adoption ticked up by 3x. Is that in terms of number of sort of digital driver’s licenses issued, or in terms of the frequency of those digital driver’s licenses being used, right, increased by a factor of three?

Calvin Fabre: It was the number of accounts that were created on LA Wallet and onboarding their digital credential in order to use them. In the months preceding the law going live, we would onboard about 30,000. IDs per month. And then when the law went into effect, we onboarded 67,000 in the month of January.

Riley Hughes: Interesting. So quite a big factor difference there.

Calvin Fabre: Now, regarding the privacy, there is lots of legislation in many states and even overseas. And you can reference the Age Verification Providers Association, AVPA, of which we are a member. They are big advocates on the privacy side of this. And we understand the arguments. The argument is, why should I have to provide a government ID in order to consume something that’s adult content, and I’m an adult? Why do I need to do that? I get that. But I think there’s a lot of technology now that can assist with that and different means of determining age, because this age ID with digital credentials is not limited to adult content. It’s going to move into online purchase of alcohol and even lower ages, such as 13 years old. Verify you’re 13 years old in order to open a social media account.

Riley Hughes: Yep.

Calvin Fabre: I know that Florida has a 16 plus, but how do we age verify remotely for consuming even a social media account? Especially if the users of that are in a 13-plus category of age.

Riley Hughes: Yep.

Calvin Fabre: They don’t have state IDs. You’re going to ask a kid to go get a state ID in order to open—

Riley Hughes: An online account. Yeah, that’s how it works in Utah. Utah has a similar law. We happen to have a mobile driver’s license in Utah as well, but it is not a means of proving age for consuming adult content as it is in Louisiana, so it’s interesting, the difference there. But okay, that’s really interesting. I think that’s all my questions on adoption. Maybe just one more, if there’s anything else you would add on where adoption is going. What are the next use cases that you expect to bring adoption even further along? I think you’d mentioned that there’s, I think on your website or something, there’s 1.8 million or so people with an mDL, which I think represents almost half of adults in Louisiana.

Calvin Fabre: Yes, it’s about 65% of the eligible population of Louisiana that are 16 plus. And that’s a pretty good critical mass there because a lot of times you have laggards or people that just don’t want to do the technology thing, and we get that.

Riley Hughes: Yeah. Where do you expect the next set of use cases to come from, or the next driver of the next level of adoption to come from?

Calvin Fabre: Yeah, I think the banks are going to start getting on board with this because there’s so much fraud and so much identity theft. We are talking with the Louisiana Bankers Association, and we’re helping them understand the assurance that they can get not only in person with a digital driver’s license, but also remotely, opening an account remotely, doing a positive confirmation of a wire transfer. The AI is so good today, you can simulate a CFO on a Zoom call asking someone to wire $10,000. So why not have a two-factor authentication with a live selfie check in order to confirm that positive pay type transaction? So I believe that because the mDL and because we have our mobile driver’s license along with our authoritative photo, I believe that we’re going to have live selfie verifications for remote transactions. I don’t think it’s just, here’s a bucket of bits that says who I am. It’s going to say, I want you to prove that you are the live human at the end of this line that’s conducting this transaction. So that’s where I think that we’re going.

Riley Hughes: Awesome. You mentioned earlier something called FlashPass and being a lower friction way to get a mobile driver’s license, and that being a key element of the adoption in Louisiana. One of the questions I wanted to ask you was, what about the adoption in Louisiana is idiosyncratic and unique to Louisiana, and what adoption patterns will we see mirrored or echoed in other states? And it sounds like one of the things that’s unique to your approach was that you had an alternate kind of version or format of the credential. Could you expand on that and maybe speak to how that aided in the initial adoption of the digital driver’s license?

Calvin Fabre: Sure. When Louisiana went rogue with their FlashPass, and a FlashPass is the digital recreation using all the same elements that I send to a printer, but I’m now assembling them to create a visual representation of my credential. That helped adoption in Louisiana in two ways, because it leverages all of the institutional knowledge of every possible relying party. The police officers know that’s a Louisiana driver’s license. The retail stores know that’s a Louisiana driver’s license when they see a high-resolution image of it. So they became more acclimated to and receptive to accepting a digital credential. And if they have some, hey, this is a duplicate, I’m going to go run it in the car. If they have a doubt about something, they’re going to ratchet up their own friction and their own assurance gathering. Another thing that contributed to the adoption of the Flash Pass and LA Wallet came from mostly ladies. When they saw a high-resolution version of their photo on a digital credential, they immediately went to the DMV and took a new photo.

Calvin Fabre: So we had an uptick in recreations of the— physical and the digital credentials. It was funny. But yes, the acceptance, the friction, the onboarding, the assurance, all of that contributed to the ease of getting a digital driver’s license into your device. But one warning, though, with a Flash Pass, can you screenshot a Flash Pass? Of course. Can you have your app interactive, press and hold on it, maybe move it around, have some hologram-ish kinds of things in your app? You can actually use another LA Wallet to scan and verify the digital credential, even though it’s not an mDL. We had that from day, you know, about a month into it.

Calvin Fabre: But there’s still a responsibility on the relying party, because if I take an mDL that has the selfie verified liveness check, digitally signed from the state, and I present it to a bar, and the doorman sees my image come up, but it’s actually your image, and he doesn’t do the comparison of who’s standing in front of him versus what is this highly assured piece of information biometric that I’ve just gotten from this amazing technology, if he does not apply those and lets that person into the bar, it’s all for naught. So there has to be just as much awareness on the responsibility of relying parties, especially ones that deal with underage drinking. As we do getting on an airplane, the consequences are the same.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, so that is interesting. It reminds me a little bit of the, during the pandemic, the different ways of doing a COVID vaccine credential, right? There were certain variants of that, like the smart health card, which were lower friction, but also maybe lower assurance, not as idealistic, not as technically perfect, but definitely lower friction to obtain. And then there were other versions which were more robust and safe and had every corner case covered, but were more complicated to implement or adopt. And smart health card by far blew all of those out of the water in terms of adoption. And so it’s an interesting lesson that an incremental approach, right? And it’s my understanding you do support the 18 or 13-5 and likely will support the 7 specification as well as that matures. So it’s not an either/or. It’s a do the sort of thing that gets adoption in the near term while also building to the standards and the sort of future-proof version of what this will look like in the long term as well.

Riley Hughes: So I think that’s a really smart approach and an interesting lesson that others can take away.

Calvin Fabre: Absolutely, yes. And we’re happy to give away all of the lessons that we’ve learned, all the pain that we’ve had. We can tell you how many users, how many full-time help desk people we need in order to support a million users.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, because that’s important.

Calvin Fabre: We have live operators on a help desk. We take tickets. We have an answer bot. We have frequently asked questions. We have to support 1.8 million people with a ton of different devices. So you have to keep track of the technology issue, your updates through the app stores, and as we’ve seen with things like CrowdStrike, you have to have a really good security presence that’s always watching. And issue no challenges.

Riley Hughes: One of the big questions that I think is on everybody’s mind is, won’t Apple and Google just own the wallets? Won’t all of everybody’s credentials just be embedded in the operating system eventually anyway? This is something we hear quite a bit, and I’m sure you’ve heard ad nauseam as well. I’m curious, if we fast forward five years and it’s not the case, or 10 years and that’s not the case, why would that have been true, right? Or another way of saying it is, could you steelman the case for why there’s a role for a standalone LA Wallet app, for example, that can stand alone from the Apple and Google wallets, which are embedded in the OS?

Calvin Fabre: Sure. We don’t think that Apple is going to be in the business of integrating to driver’s license bureaus and saying, Hey, we want to handle your transaction of renewing your driver’s license. The state is always going to be in the business of verifying your identity, usually in person. Our Department of DHS has rules that if I want to create a credential, I’ve got to appear in person, prove all these things before I can issue a credential. Yes, they can go into LA Wallet or into Apple Wallet, but what we’ve found is that our residents are driving not only adoption, but the next set of features. They’re asking us to say, You know what? I want to add the wildlife management tracking into my LA Wallet, because when I’m hunting and fishing in a certain wildlife management area, I want to support this region. I want to support how many people are coming in and coming out, and how many fish were observed to be caught or were sick, you know, when I picked them up. This is a very state-specific type thing. Medicaid health plan cards, we’ve added that here for our residents.

Calvin Fabre: We just don’t think Apple has that kind of presence where they’re going to be high touch with the culture of each particular state. That’s why we like that the state drives the next set of features based on what the residents want. So renewing driver’s licenses, adding your vehicle registration, adding vehicle registration renewals to your wallet, concealed handgun permits. It happens in every state, but the laws of every state are going to be different. Some states are constitutional carry. Some states you have to take a test. So I just think that the states are in a better position to be more nimble. Do I think that people are going to say— Why can’t I push this to my Apple Wallet? No one’s really asked that yet. They love LA Wallet so far.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, that’s an interesting line of thinking there, because you have this consumer portal where people express their preferences and desires, right? So I guess the counterfactual here would be, how upvoted is the Add to Apple Wallet feature request on that public-facing website? Do you know whether that has been something that has been consistently requested and upvoted by people, or are people voting with their feet and basically saying that they appreciate a sort of state-specific solution which is bundled with other state-specific things, including these other types of credentials and state healthcare-related stuff and so forth?

Calvin Fabre: Sure. On our website of feedback.lawallet.com, we do have an entry that says, Add to Apple Wallet and Apple Watch, and we’ve probably skewed the results because we put a big not planned designation on there. So that’s probably not going to go anywhere on that one.

Riley Hughes: Interesting. Is there a world where consumer, where things could play nice together, where you could have LA Wallet, which is the primary mechanism, and if a consumer opted to do so, they could add it to the Apple Wallet and Apple Watch or to their Android wallet or Samsung wallet or whatever the case may be? Do you think there’s a world where these play nice together and are compatible with each other?

Calvin Fabre: Yeah, I do. Absolutely. In fact, we experienced that with the Smart Health card. We had Clear. Clear gave us a call and said, Hey, look, we’ve got a lot of people that are uploading their Smart Health cards, and the source is coming from LA Wallet. Can we make that easier? I’m like, yeah, sure. We’ll integrate with that just fine. Yeah, we like to play well with others. It doesn’t matter what wallet it’s in. It’s a verifiable credential, so I can move it from one wallet securely to another one if I do my homework very well on that.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, interesting.

Calvin Fabre: So, yes.

Riley Hughes: One other thread that I wanted to pull on is you mentioned there’s a cohort or a subset of people in Louisiana, which is the same, similar everywhere, where people are really afraid of government tracking, right? Or they’re really hesitant about digital credentials from a government because of this risk of government surveillance or perceived risk of government surveillance. People have been burned a lot by technology companies saying one thing and doing another. People have been burned by trusting a technology company with their data and then having it be breached, right?

Calvin Fabre: Yes.

Riley Hughes: So it would be understandable to me, frankly, that somebody would look at something like—you might say, Oh, we don’t retain any data about who is verifying age with adult content sites, or, We don’t track you when you use this to buy alcohol or something like that, and sell the data back to the health insurance companies or whatever, right? Like, you can say you don’t do these things, and you probably don’t because you seem like a trustworthy guy and all of that. But people have been burned before. How do you build trust with people that these types of things aren’t happening? Is there a way, potentially, to bring even more sophisticated technologies into play that make it impossible for you to actually track these things and correlate users and so forth, or how are you approaching that?

Calvin Fabre: Yeah, that’s a great point. The initial set of principles we laid out included nothing extra. So when your license gets onboarded onto LA Wallet, the only fields we bring down is what we need to render your driver’s license, nothing extra. Single use. Any time you present that driver’s license data to someone else, to a relying party, that’s the only time that data is being used. Purely optional. This is an optional endeavor. We don’t require anybody to have a digital driver’s license, and we will not support legislation that does. And then the last one, most importantly, is the no copies, meaning all of the data that we add onto your driver’s license credential in LA Wallet is retrieved from the authoritative source via a secure link that the state has vetted all of our systems, right? We don’t keep copies of that. That means that if the state’s mainframe or system goes down, we can’t do verifications, we can’t do onboardings. But that’s the trade-off that we are willing to take in order to not keep a copy of the driver’s license database in our system.

Calvin Fabre: And we recommend that to any state thinking about it. Make sure that we’re just linking to the authoritative source, not making multiple copies of it for this app and that app and this department and that department. That was a big one early on.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, those are great principles. I appreciate that.

Calvin Fabre: Yeah, and one other principle that I would love to see when we start getting to this relying party infrastructure, for example, we have a number of casinos that use our verification piece of LA Wallet to verify not only plastic credentials, but digital mDLs that come into their casino. Well, they have different guidelines and different rules than the normal AAMVA guidelines. They do want to retain some of these scans of people that come in, especially the photo of the person, because they have what’s called purse grabs that happen all the time in the—

Riley Hughes: In the casino. Sure.

Calvin Fabre: So they need to be able to say, Hey, law enforcement, I know I scanned this person earlier in the night. May I have their DL photo so that we can prove that it was this person who took this purse? Can we do that? In order to do that, I have to log the fact that we scanned that person. They came in, they were over 21, and we asked them for their photo. They agreed to let us have the photo. We’re only going to keep it for a day or so in this system. Now again, that’s a storage thing that’s outside the guidelines of the ISO recommendation and the AAMVA group that spends a lot of time thinking through these things. So it’s going to be different with each state. When we are doing things like age verifications for adult content and other—maybe you’re buying weapons online, which is completely legal—there has to be an age verification, sometimes a background check. Why not put these complicated systems for states out in the public domain?

Calvin Fabre: Here’s the open source version of everything that we’re doing so that the community can go out and say, I’m looking at this, and yes, the principles that they are involved in and everything that they’re doing, the driver’s license number lives in memory for a split second and it’s gone. I can trust this body of open source code that is running the state’s relying party system. And then you’ve got this idea of verifiers, third-party verifiers. They’re going to need to onboard certain businesses to monitor the verifications. If we onboard a bank and we are giving them access to verifications of states’ data, we have to be governed by a set of principles as well. So just like the payment card industry has the PCI, the SS compliance, and all those kinds of compliances, I think there’s going to need to be some more compliances for handlers of digital identity data.

Riley Hughes: Yeah. Great. That makes sense. Yeah, that’s a really good segue, actually, into one more kind of risk, I think, with mobile driver’s licenses. You know, beyond the public perception of surveillance or whatever, which sounds like you’re tackling and the state is tackling. Another risk is that people refer to it as Jevons paradox, which is you make something a lot easier to do, you’ll get a lot more of it. So, for example, it used to be that I only have to show my driver’s license at Target when I’m returning something without a receipt, right? If it’s super easy for me to display my mobile driver’s license in a quick presentation, perhaps they’ll ask me to show it right when I land on their website, right? You could imagine a future world where every single place you go, you’re using this thing all the time. It’s like the new cookie pop-up banner, the GDPR pop-up, but even worse because you’re having to show your mobile driver’s license. How do you prevent relying parties from either asking when they don’t really need to, or asking for too much data when they do request it, right?

Riley Hughes: And this isn’t maybe a LA Wallet thing per se. This is more about how should we, as an industry, think about mitigating this risk on the relying party side?

Calvin Fabre: Wow, that’s a good question because now you’re talking about a challenge of either age, identity, or some other biometric. And then you have to introduce this idea of a lease time, a time to live. How long does that challenge live? If I’m age verifying someone for an adult site, do I just trust them for that one age challenge and say, I’ll never check you again? Or do I say, you know, it makes sense for me to check you once every 24 hours so that I know that you’ve gone to work and—

Riley Hughes: Some underage person is now using this same content,

Calvin Fabre: kind of like going to a bar where they’re required by law to check you every single time. But yeah, how do we make that easier to where it’s as fast as doing a face unlock on a phone or a fingerprint check, just to say that, yes, I’ve already verified myself and I’m the same person before? I think that the legislation is going to have to—the legislation policies—to make it not so overbearing is going to have to use a lot of wisdom on that and hold those two things in. How often do I check, and what is the minimum amount of information that I need to know? For example, going back to the 8 plus 13 plus account opening for a social media site, we believe that AI is so good that I could use an app or even a webcam to say, Hey, look, you’re opening up a site. Okay, I just need to make sure you’re 13 or over, and I need to make sure my AI is going to tell you if you’re a live human or a mannequin or a photo on an iPad. It’s that good, but all we need to know are you 13 plus. And if you’re 13 plus by your face and your features, maybe you’re a young-looking 13 plus. Guess what?

Calvin Fabre: You have five minutes to go get a responsible adult who’s now 25 or older that can vouch for you. So we’re introducing this idea of vouching without anyone uploading an ID, a government ID, because the AI can say, I don’t know who it is. It’s just a—we’re not doing one-to-N or one-to-one. We’re doing one to, How old is your face?

Riley Hughes: Yeah.

Calvin Fabre: And are you a live person? I’m over 13, 80 percent confidence. Great. Go get someone in the house that’s 25 or older. Hey, I’m here. Oh, you’re trying to open up a pet account? Okay, fine. Yeah, here. Do my liveness check, and I’m just vouched for an adult. I think that is a creative way to solve having to upload government IDs.

Riley Hughes: Yeah. Great, Calvin, this has been a super great conversation. I think it’s been one of the most grounded and concrete conversations we’ve had, which is perfect. Really appreciate you coming on. The last question I like to close out with every guest is just, tell me what the future of identity looks like to you, and why does that matter for the world?

Calvin Fabre: Wow. The future of identity, it’s an expansion and a retraction. We’re going to expand into using more and more reliable technology, but we’re going to retract in the amount of information that is going to live out on the web. So these large credit companies, the way that they know who I am is, did you buy an Infiniti Q50 in 2018? Yeah. I don’t want everybody to have all of that information to use, because it can, again, be breached. So I think with the advent of blockchain, with AI, we’re going to see an expansion in technology, but a contraction on the amount of data that we actually have to share.

Riley Hughes: Brilliant. Really well put. And yeah, that gets me excited about the future, so I appreciate it, Calvin. If people want to get in touch with you, or they want to learn more about what you’re doing, or potentially work with your company, how should they get in touch with you, or do you have anything to plug or anywhere to point them?

Calvin Fabre: Sure. Just go to Envoc.com. Envoc is E-N-V-O-C dot com. And we are going to be at the Identity Week conference for 2024. We’ll be announcing a new app called Privacy Guardian, which does promote this idea of vouching without digital IDs, the anti-pattern of an identity conference. But thanks for having me. This is a great podcast. I’ve listened to previous episodes, and all of your content is very relevant and inspiring. So thanks for doing this.

Riley Hughes: Thanks a lot for joining the cast. This is going to be a great one that I recommend people listen to for sure.