No Phone Home Is the Privacy Rebellion Digital IDs Didn’t See Coming

Welcome to a new privacy-first initiative challenging the digital identity status quo, urging a sharp turn away from the surveillance-ready infrastructure embedded in mobile driver’s licenses.

The campaign, called No Phone Home, brings together a broad alliance of civil liberties groups, privacy experts, technologists, lawmakers, and public officials who are resisting the ways digital IDs compromise people's rights.

What’s fueling the campaign is concern over how mobile driver’s licenses, increasingly adopted in the US and abroad, are built atop a technical framework that allows them to silently transmit data back to issuing authorities. While this function may not be active by default, it exists; and that, privacy advocates argue, is a serious vulnerability.

Even if unused, if the architecture allows for data to be sent back to government servers, it eventually will be the campaign’s statement warns.

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