The New South Wales government has announced that 53% of all licence holders — or three million drivers — in the state have opted to embrace the digital driver licence (DLL).
The DLL was launched in November 2019 and is available through the Service NSW app. Blacktown, Kellyville, and Castle Hill still stand as the top three suburbs for DDL downloads.
“This is great news and a strong indication that customers want to go wallet less,” Minister for Digital Victor Dominello said.
“We want to make life easier for customers and technology is part of the solution. The DDL is safe, convenient, and hassle free.”
Last September, the NSW Parliament passed legislation that gave the DDL the same legal status as a physical driver’s licence, and it is now accepted by police in every Australian state and territory.
Despite this, NSW drivers are still being recommended to carry their physical licence as backup when travelling interstate.
The state government continues to work on digitising more licences and IDs. In March, a trial of a digital photo card was completed, and digitisation of all trade licences began with the digital white card in April.
Due to the success of DLL, other states around the country have since followed suit.
Information on thousands of New South Wales driver’s licence-holders was breached last year, with reports indicating a cloud storage folder that had over 100,000 images was mistakenly left open.
Cyber Security NSW confirmed a commercial entity was responsible for the breach of scanned driver’s licence images. At the time, it said it was the responsibility of the commercial entity to investigate this matter and notify any customers if their data had been breached.
See also: Service NSW not effectively handling private information: NSW Auditor-General
Despite the incident, the state government has reinforced that the DDL is “hosted securely on the Service NSW app which locks with a PIN and can be accessed offline”.
“It provides additional levels of security and protection against identity fraud, compared to the plastic driver licence,” the state government said.
