Forgot Your ID? iPhones Now Have A Convenient Solution — But Experts Warn It Comes With Risks.

We already use our phones to pay for coffees and restaurants, and now we have one more new way to use our phones – to verify our identity in order to fly. On Wednesday, Apple said its users can now digitize their passport or eligible driver’s license information in their Apple Wallets.

As part of its new Digital ID feature that the tech giant launched in early November, your digitized travel information will be accepted by the Transportation Security Administration for domestic flights in select airports. Apple joins Google, which already allows people to store their passports in their phone’s wallet.

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It is the latest example of how using your phone to access everyday essentials is becoming mainstream. You can already add a driver’s license or state ID in some states through participating mobile apps or via Google Wallet in at least 11 states. Now, you can also add your state ID to your Apple mobile device for residents in a total of 12 states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Hawaii, Iowa, Maryland, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio and West Virginia — as well as Puerto Rico.

Here’s how digitizing your passport for your phone works. If you have an iPhone, you scan the photo page of your physical passport, along with the security chip on the back of your passport, and you take a selfie. Then you do some face and head movements during the setup process. Once you’re verified, your ID is added to your Apple Wallet. Similarly, if you have an Android phone, you scan the photo page of your passport and the security chip on the back, along with a face scan. Google said its identity verification should just take a few minutes.

But just because you can do this easily, should you? Security experts weighed in on the pros and cons of uploading digital IDs like passports onto your phone for travel.

It’s Convenient For People Who Forget IDs

TSA says that “more than 250 TSA checkpoints” participate in this service. But don’t bet on your airport having this service and just leave your physical ID at home.

It’s also important to remember the limits of this service: You cannot use it to fly abroad. TSA itself states, “Travelers should always carry a physical and acceptable form of ID.”

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“At least to travel internationally, you still have to bring a real passport anyway,” said David Huerta, senior digital security trainer at Freedom of the Press Foundation. “That’s the only reason I need to bring a passport, so it’s kind of pointless in my mind.”

There Are Also Privacy Concerns, Experts Say

The chances of having your phone searched by a border agent at the airport have significantly increased under Donald Trump’s administration. In 2025, Customs and Border Protection said it searched more than 14,000 devices from April through June, which is almost a 17% spike over the previous three-month high in 2022. If you want to be safer while traveling, you might want to keep all of your electronics turned off and not rely on a digital ID, Huerta said.

“I think having that physical documentation may be the better way to go” during a TSA checkpoint, Huerta said. This way, it’s harder for a border agent to unlock your phone without your permission.

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There is also the potential of an iOS or Android data breach that would compromise your mobile passport information. Huerta said this risk is “probably pretty low,” but at the same time, “If I had to do this, I would probably wait another year and just see what happens” before being an early adopter of this technology, he said.

And on top of immediate privacy issues, the expansion of digital ID services does increase the demand for verification in the future. On its website, Apple envisions a world where you can use this digital ID for more than just verifying identity for flights.

“In the future, users will be able to present their digital ID at additional select businesses and organizations for identity and age verification in person, in apps, and online,” Apple states.

A future in which we need digital IDs to access the world online would be a problem, privacy experts say. “This [statement from Apple] presents scope creep as convenience and overshadows how vastly different the internet would be if websites and apps were empowered to ask for ID,” said Alexis Hancock, director of engineering at digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation. “I can’t recommend usage online until regulators solidify protections and privacy for people who may use it in that context.“

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Uploading digital IDs for age verification requirements is now becoming more common across the internet for adult websites, search engines and even everyday games like Roblox.

“The kind of governments that decide what is and is not age-gated is going to be dependent on who’s in office at any given point,” said Thorin Klosowski, a security and privacy activist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Maybe at one point it is Roblox, but maybe at another point it is certain types of religious information or health information …You can sort of see where [an age verification requirement] just starts becoming problematic pretty quickly.“

That’s why adding your passport to your phone is a convenient but not neutral choice. When you add your digital ID to your phone’s wallet, you should know it could introduce privacy risks in the future.

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