Florida has moved closer to establishing a formal legal framework for mobile driver’s licenses, with the state Senate passing amended House Bill 543 on March 6. The House had approved the bill 107 to 1 on March 4, and the Senate followed with a 33-to-0 vote, signaling broad bipartisan support for bringing mDL infrastructure to the state.
The bill sets out technical and privacy requirements that align closely with international standards. Credentials issued under the framework must comply with ISO/IEC 18013-5 and 18013-7, the specifications that underpin interoperable mobile identity documents and their online presentation protocols. The bill also mandates offline verification capability, meaning a verifier must be able to confirm the authenticity of a credential without making any call back to a state system or external server.
Selective disclosure is required, allowing holders to share only the attributes necessary for a given transaction rather than exposing a full credential. The system must be designed to prevent transaction linkability, a privacy property that ensures different presentations of the same credential cannot be correlated to track a user across interactions. Explicit consent is required before a credential is added to a wallet or its attributes are shared.
The Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles would be barred from tracking where a credential is presented, and from sharing, storing, or selling related information except where law requires it. Verifiers may retain only temporary data strictly necessary for the transaction, and are required to validate credentials offline. The system is optional rather than mandatory.
The bill reflects a broader pattern of privacy-focused mDL legislation taking shape across the US. Utah recently passed SB 275, which sets comparable privacy and selective disclosure standards for mobile wallet credentials. Florida’s framework goes further on the verifier side, writing offline verification and data minimization directly into statute rather than leaving those requirements to implementation guidance.
The bill has not yet been signed into law, but the unanimous Senate vote suggests minimal friction ahead. If enacted, Florida would join a growing group of states moving mDL policy beyond basic rollout legislation and into explicit governance of how credentials are presented, verified, and retained. As state frameworks become more specific, interoperability and compliance expectations for wallet and verifier vendors will sharpen accordingly.
Sources: Florida Senate (HB 543)
– Mobile ID World Editorial Team
