Barcode data in a drivers license.

I’m sure everyone has seen the barcode on the back of their drivers license.  Most states have them.  I think there are one or two that don’t have a barcode.  They might have changed now.  Canada also has similar barcodes.  Pretty much any state that has a barcode has a PDF417 barcode on it.  If you’re not sure what a PDF417 barcode is please see my post titled PDF417 barcodes on drivers licenses – part 1.  Just click this link to get there.
http://www.barcodehelponline.com/2008/11/pdf417-barcodes-on-drivers-licenses-part-1/

What exactly is encoded on that barcode? Well, let’s take a look. Below is a scan of a NYS sample drivers license into Notepad.
@

AAMVA36001001DL00270249DL
DAADOE@JOHN@B@3
DAG2892 TANNER RD
DAIWEEDSPORT
DAJNY
DAK13166
DAQ298665337
DBB19511221
DBD20031211
DBA20111221
DARD
DAS
DAT
DBC1
DAU508
DAYBR
DBK
DBH

All that data is taken directly from a USB keyboard connected barcode scanner. What you don’t see are the non-printable or control characters that are included in the drivers license. Those can be seen if you’re scanning into a serial application instead of a USB keyboard type application like I did.

NYS uses the suggested AAMVA formatting for their licenses. This simply means they chose to adhere to the recommendations put forth by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Admininstrators or AAMVA. All the data I’m talking about above is available for free from their site in the specification. So I’m not telling anyone anything that isn’t already freely downloadable. The AAMVA website is available here – www.aamva.org.

You can see all the pertinent data that’s encoded in the drivers license barcode.  Name, address, date of birth, license number, expiration date etc.  It’s all in human readable format.  If you’ve got a 2D barcode scanner you can scan the data directly into Notepad and see the same thing I’ve just shown you above. 

What good is the data?  Think about it…you want to buy cigarettes or alcohol?  Your date of birth is encoded in the license.  That means the seller of the goods just needs to scan your license into their application and the application, with the right algorithm, can extract your birthdate then do a calculation based on today’s date and get your exact age.  It’s much faster than a cashier trying to verify by looking at your license and trying to calculate the age.  Or many people have an easy time of modifying the birthdate on the license.  They would have a harder time changing the barcode.  It’s not impossible but harder than simply changing the date on the license. 

Another use is instant credit apps.  How many times have you wanted to sign up for that store credit card so you could get 30% off but realized it takes forever to process the application because somebody has to fill out all the data?  Not now, all the operator needs to do is scan your drivers license to automatically fill out the form electronically.  It takes seconds instead of minutes. 

The last application I’ll talk about, and it’s getting bigger all the time, is for Methamphetamine laws.  As you probably know many shady characters are buying over the counter cold medications and using them to make Meth.  At this point in time their is no way to control how much of this medication somebody buys.  Many places have a notebook in which they will write down your name if you buy some.  Then if you come back to the store they have to look in the notebook to see when the last time was that you purchased it.  Very time consuming and there’s nothing that prevents you from going to their sister store down the road and buying more.  Now some of the major pharmacies are using barcode scanners to scan drivers licenses and sending that data to a store database.  That way all the stores are tied together so you would not be able to simply go from store to sister store to purchase over the counter cold medicine.  Eventually there will be a national database that tracks everyone everytime they purchase cold medications that contains pseudaphadrine.

The AAMVA has their specification.  And they have a few different revisions of it.  So data between states might be slightly different.  Plus the AAMVA format is only a “recommended” format.  There is nothing that says a state must use the format.  A state can do anything they want.  And that’s the reason that not all states follow the AAMVA format.  Georgia is totally encrypted.  A scanner will still read the Georgia license, but the data that is sent back to the PC is garbage – unless you have the decryption routine from Georgia.  North Carolina was the same way.  But their encryption routine has been broken and they’ve now adopted the AAMVA format.  I think Texas only has a linear barcode on their license.  Last time I knew Texas had a law that prevented anyone, example: retailer, from saving drivers license data about a customer. Although if there isn’t a 2D barcode on the back of the license, then the only data that could possibly be on the license would be the drivers license number encoded in the linear barcode. And if it is just the drivers license number, then somebody would need to have access to a database of all licenses for that number to be of any use. I’m sure law enforcement has access to the database, but no non-govermental agencies would have access to the database.   So don’t be a store owner trying to save drivers license data in Texas. As often as they fry people down in Texas you’ll probably go to the electric chair ;-)

If you think getting data from a drivers license could be beneficial to you their are a few ways to do it.  You can write your own PC based algorithm to parse out all the data.  That would be quite a task.  Their is a company called Positive Access (www.positiveaccess.com) that provides software tools you can integrate into your application and let them handle the parsing.  The good thing about this is they provide you with updates as states change their encoding schemes.  Finally their is barcode scanner based parsing.  Honeywell Scanning and Mobility and Motorola both offer solutions for parsing drivers license barcodes directly on the scanners and outputting the data as you need it.  Be sure to check them out.

Happy Scanning!  :-)

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