Digitizing your California driver's license is now an option for iPhone and Android users.
It's all part of the DMV's broader mobile driver's license pilot program that was launched last year.
On Tuesday, the DMV hosted an event called Community Hackathon inside the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.
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Steve Gordon, Director of the DMV, said this daylong event is about building community with budding technology.
"The paper driver's license in one form or another has been around for about 120 years so this is the first major change to being purely digital," Gordon said.
Different private sector businesses and startups had the opportunity to present to a panel of judges how their app or their innovation could benefit from the mobile driver's license.
"I think they're all looking for different things, they're looking for privacy, they're looking for accessibility, the scalability," Gordon said.
Currently in California, the mobile driver's license is accepted as a valid ID at TSA checkpoints at certain airports.
So far, 700,000 Californians have had their license digitized.
"First, it's bound to the phone itself so it's locked with the phone in the toughest storage place in the phone so it's tied to the phone so if you lose the phone you won't be able to get access to it because you're going to need your normal biometrics to unlock and access that information," Gordon said.
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Three longtime friends, children of farm workers and Stanford graduates, co-founded the startup Entidad.
CEO Jesus Torres explained they've built a digital credential for farmworkers.
"A mobile number, an email address, a username or password," Torres said. "Now these ways of authenticating don't work for underserved communities, they're migratory, they're always on the move."
The hope is that they will be able to access services remotely.
"This is a great way to use a credential issue by an authority here as California, and be able to use it within our ecosystem right so organizations feel - or have the assurance that they're dealing with a real person that's been vetted, that's been verified," Torres said.
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Torres said it's about having agency over your information.
"What this is, is the first steps in us being able to start collecting, owning, and holding our data so that we can use it how we want to use it, so it provides a value for us not others you know taking our data and selling it," Torres said.
Gail Hodges is the Executive Director of OpenID Foundation.
"We're really at the beginning of this inflection point of adoption," Hodges said.
Hodges said in the US a couple million of these digital credentials are just starting to be issued, compared to 1.5 billion digital credentials being issued across 30 different countries.
"The example that I give around digital identity credentials, imagine the world before there were mobile devices commonly used or the world before the internet was commonly available, we didn't really know how important it would become in our everyday lives, we're there right now with digital identity credentials. It's the very beginning of the journey," Hodges said.
As far as the next steps, once there are 1.5 million mobile driver's license users, the DMV will report back to the legislature.
Lawmakers will decide whether to expand the pilot program, make it permanent, or cancel it.