There’s a lot of information about you on the back of your state-issued driver’s license or non-driver ID card, but does scanning your license or making a copy of it give potential identity thieves key information about you? It’s not easy to find out what data is encoded in the barcodes on the back of your ID cards, and your state’s motor vehicles department may not want you to know.
We use driver’s licenses as photo ID for everything from buying cold medicine or booze to boarding a plane, in addition to using them as proof that we’re legally permitted to drive.
Yet people often wonder what information is embedded in those barcodes, and consumer problem-solving columnist Karin Price Mueller of the Star-Ledger decided to find out. Lots of extensive reporting got her…well, she found out what one of the barcodes means, but what the other one contains is a mystery that mere mortals are not allowed to understand.
What the MVC, New Jersey’s motor vehicle agency, could tell her was that some of the data embedded on the back of your license is the same information that’s on the front of your license. There’s your name, birthdate, address, height, and weight. That’s to prevent people from altering the front of their license–say, the year of their birth. The other barcodes, though? We can’t know what information is encoded there for security reasons.
Bamboozled: What the bar codes on your driver’s license reveal about you, and why it matters [Newark Star-Ledger]
- Because the driver’s license is widely accepted as a form of identification in different areas and is considered the primary method of identification in countries like the US, it is imperative to use a barcode reader that accurately reads and extracts the data.
- Pdf417 barcode generator for drivers license how to create the PDF417 Barcode? If you want make bar.
Example of Driver License reader XML output. The following example shows the typical (California) barcode contents as provided by the DL/ID reader. The available contents varies from state to state, and between generations of licenses.
Editor's Note: This article originally appeared on Consumerist.
According to the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA) specification, PDF417 symbology is used for storing personal information on US driver licenses. It comprises critical information about the cardholder, such as their name, gender, date of birth, height, etc. Many organizations, both government and private, use the driver’s license for identification purposes and age verification. Barcode recognition technology is considered more accurate and cost-effective than OCR for extracting data. Because the driver’s license is widely accepted as a form of identification in different areas and is considered the primary method of identification in countries like the US, it is imperative to use a barcode reader that accurately reads and extracts the data. |
Cross-platform and Cross-device Support
Dynamsoft Barcode SDK is designed to read barcodes from a variety of platforms and devices. Below are some of the ways you can use the barcode SDK for reading the information on PDF417 driver licenses format.
Barcode On Back Of License
Scan documents and read driver’s license synchronously
Working together with Dynamic Web TWAIN, the barcode reader add-on allows you to scan a picture of a US driver’s license from a document scanner and extract data from PDF417 barcode.
Decode PDF417 from cameras in a web application on mobile and desktop devices
Dynamsoft JavaScript Barcode SDK provides high-performance barcode scanning functionality to web developers. It also offers built-in camera module APIs, making the process of creating an HTML5 barcode reader with cameras extremely convenient.
Read driver’s licenses in Android and iOS native applications
With Dynamsoft Barcode Reader SDK for iOS and Android, developers can easily create a barcode reader app to extract information from PDF417 codes on driver’s licenses.
ParserDynamsoft Barcode Reader SDK is capable of quickly parsing PDF417 barcode symbology. Once decoded, a parser is required to convert the information contained in the barcode into human-readable formats. The parser breaks down the decoded PDF417 values into field-value pairs, such as cardholder’s name, eye color, height, date of birth, etc. | A snippet of parsed PDF417 values is shown below:
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Case Studies
- Millennial Vision, Inc.
- VALID USA, Inc
Millennial Vision, Inc. (MVi) is known for providing enterprise content management and document management solutions to credit unions and various financial institutions across the United States and the Caribbean. While looking for a robust barcode reader SDK, MVi tried Dynamsoft Barcode SDK and selected it for its simplicity, power, and cost-effectiveness.
Our barcode reader SDK helps MVi scan PDF417 barcodes from driver’s licenses and further use the extracted data to auto-populate metadata fields for financial institution forms and applications.
Another essential factor in MVi’s decision to choose Dynamsoft Barcode Reader SDK was the time to market. With DBR, they saved a lot of time that would have been required to develop a barcode reader solution in-house.
Us Driver's License Barcode Attributes By State Oc
VALID USA, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of its Brazilian parent company VALID S.A, was looking for an image capture software development kit (SDK) for its popular product, WebLink ID. WebLink ID is an enrolment, credentials, and application management web app. The application is used for issuing mass student IDs, transit cards, access control cards, ID documents, and state driver’s licenses. Thus, document scanning/image capture capabilities were a requirement for the software. But, VALID did not want to build this capability from scratch in order to focus on its core expertise.
After trying and testing many products, VALID chose Dynamsoft's ImageCapture Suite SDK, which helped them shorten time to market and build better software.
Today, the application is used by thousands of workers to capture millions of images annually in diverse environments. Some of these are K-12 and higher education institutions, US state governments, the public transit industry, and many other vertical markets that require photo identification.