Amid a plastic card shortage at the Land Transportation Office (LTO) that has forced drivers renewing their licenses to print their IDs on paper in the meantime, the agency has announced that it will soon introduce digital licenses.
The LTO announced that it will work with the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) to create electronic versions of driver’s licenses in order to “digitalize its services.”
LTO chief Jay Art Tugade said that the electronic version would serve as an alternative to the physical version of the license, and along with security features, would be integrated into the “super app” that the DICT is reportedly developing.
“We also appreciate the way the super app functions similarly to a wallet, containing all government IDs, among other things, within your mobile device,” Tugade said.
Yet the announcement did not sit right with netizens, who believed that the country’s digital infrastructure was not ready to accommodate what would be a massive influx of digital license holders.
“Knowing the data security of governments digitally, I wouldn’t want to have this. Connecting the license to a ‘super app’ which contains ALL of your government IDs. That’s just Data Breach waiting to happen,” u/Teeneeweenee said on Reddit.
“Not a good idea. The government has poor IT security,” u/rizalmart chimed in.
