California is currently leading efforts to expand its digital identity verification programs to other state agencies. The California state government’s participation and leadership in these initiatives is helping to improve Californians’ access to services and benefits. They have long been committed to ensuring data privacy in all of their work.

California Chief Technology Officer Jonathan Porat said the state’s IT bureau is collaborating with different agencies to create new programs using digital identity verification. Together with these efforts, they build on the state’s mobile driver’s license program, which officially kicked off last fall. Their goal is to broaden the applicability of digital IDs, beyond transit and transportation.

Given these challenges, the CDT is starting a new pilot project in partnership with the California Public Utilities Commission. This new unified portal will help state and local residents quickly check their eligibility for various available benefits programs just by logging in with their digital IDs. This new initiative is a key step towards the state’s larger goal of using digital identity verification to make services more accessible and convenient to residents of California.

"By creating a consistent environment where we’re able to share information, and thankfully, it’s shared directly from a resident’s device to the identity service providers, so to the groups that are making sure that there isn’t fraud and that no one is stealing your identity. It means that the government doesn’t need to maintain like a giant list, or a giant list across all these different agencies of all of this different information about each Californian." - Jonathan Porat

The CDT has worked closely with the newly formed California Privacy Protection Agency to strengthen data privacy and security. Collectively, they ensure that identity verification vendors abide by the Delete Act, a 2023 law that augments the California Consumer Privacy Act.

California is looking at more innovative and creative ways to go beyond traditional use cases of digital ID verification. And these programs are advancing contactless payment methods to access resources such as discounted transit fares for senior citizens and veterans.

"[We’ve] seen a lot of states come out with mobile versions of their driver’s license, and we’re proud as a state to have that as well, but we’re really thinking about, how can we digitize the way that we validate residents identities and eligibility for different programs." - Jonathan Porat

The state’s chief technology agency is looking to capitalize on other recent successful projects using digital ID. As of last fall, Cal-ITP administrators were in discussions with up to 13 other transit operators to bring more operators aboard the contactless payment program.

California’s IT department already has memorandums of understanding with the federal VA and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid services to grant automatic discounts based on user group.

"What we’re doing now is trying to expand the breadth of those different benefits programs. So we started by looking at a couple of simple things, like age-related discounts, and now we’re going so far as to have agreements with the federal VA and CMS, the group that manages Medicare and Medicaid, so that if you receive disability, if you are above a certain age, if you have certain status, you can get those discounts automatically, just by paying with your wireless payment." - Jonathan Porat