First off, I say US because, well, I haven’t seen liscenses for anywhere else, so, I don’t know if the same is true. Anyway, the question I have is, What is the purpose of the magnetic strip on the back of a drivers liscense? I’ve never seen any swipe liscense or insert liscense here, like you do with, say, credit cards, infact I’ve never seen any use for it and niether has anyone I’ve asked, so, I pose this question to you now in some strange hope someone knows.
That magnetic stripe stores Name, Address, License Number, Expiration Date, and Date of Birth. AAMVA is one standard encoding format. Swiping the card is an easy way to
- verify that you are of legal age to purchase liquor or enter a 21+ club
- allow a police officer to easily verify that the license hasn’t been tampered with
- allow a retailer to add you to a mailing list or other customer database
- as an a billing aid to record time and dates of visits to places like health clubs
- a quick way to verify identity at a bank (in addition to checking the front of the license) again to verify that license hasn’t been tampered with by an amateur
I could go on, but there’s a ton of info about this on the internet already. IMHO, it hasn’t caught on for two reasons 1) Not every state has magnetic stripes on their licenses 2) not every state that does include a magnetic stripe chooses the same encoding format. When it’s standardized nationwide, you’ll see businesses invested in license readers.
Welcome to the Straight Dope!
My state (Washington) does not have magnetic strips on the drivers license.
I also have never seen one “swiped” for information.
I have seen grocery stores in California use the magnetic swipe information when taking a check from someone, but that is the only time I have ever seen it used.
About two years ago, I had all the card in my wallet demagnetized. I did not get my license replaced and it hasn’t come up yet.
Hawaii also does not have a magnetic stripe (Washington is the only other one I know and it has been mentioned already.)
Conn. licenses don’t have a magnetic strip but they do have a bar code. I’ve only had it swiped at liquor stores, presumably to prove it wasn’t altered to falsely indicate I was 21+.
Rhode Island licenses have no magnetic strip, no bar code, no nothing. Just a cheap laminated license.
Barcodes a typically just another font. I wonder how many people have just printed out a new barcode.
It is becoming increasingly common for the big clubs and bars in Houston to look at your card to see if the picture matches up, then swipe it on a little machine with an LCD that checked your birthday. I almost didn’t get in once when my license had just expired; I was rejected by the box.
Florida does have the strip, and I’ve only used it once. The ticketless checkin kiosks for Continental airlines wants a credit card for ID, but also took my driver’s license. But in the four years I’ve lived here, I’ve never used the strip for anything other than this.
The strips kick ass! It saves me so much time when I go to buy beer. They just verify the info on my license with what the scan says instead of spending ten minutes bending my license trying to catch a fake. And by the way, the magnetic strip readers are nothing fancy at all. They look pretty inexpensive, so I don’t see why more places don’t use them.
One of my customers runs a landfill in Southern Cal. As part of a plan to track the waste that comes in, they wanted to collect the driver’s license information for every driver of every truck that comes into the pit.
So I bought an inexpensive mag strip scanner. It cost about $200. I scanned a few licenses, figured out where and how the relevant information was stored on the magnetic strip, and added a function to their ticketing program that allows them to swipe a driver’s license, push a button, and the driver’s license number, name, and address are recorded automatically in the database along with the regular ticket information.
So everyone who brings a load to that landfill has to swipe their driver’s license. If the mag strip is damaged and won’t read, the scalehouse operator has to read the information off the license and enter it by hand. They hate this.
Ugly
Speaking of mag strip readers, how easily can one get mag strip writers?
Is the data on the mag strip protected by strong encryption (e.g. signed by the DMV’s private key), or can any fake-ID merchant with a mag writer produce counterfeit licenses that will pass the swipe test?