· Written and maintained by Nonimo
To watermark and redact a driver’s license copy before it goes to a bank, landlord, employer or agency, leave visible what the person asking actually checks, usually your name, your photo and sometimes the license number. Cover the rest: the document discriminator (the DD number), your signature, and your date of birth and home address when nobody asked for them. Then add a watermark across the card naming who the copy is for and the month, and send that version.
When only the front is needed, leave the back of the card, with its barcode, out of the copy.
A license copy gets requested all the time: a landlord screening a rental application, a car rental counter, a new employer, an insurance agent quoting an auto policy, a medical office at check in. Most of them need to confirm who you are. Few of them need every field on the card, and a complete copy is exactly what an identity thief would ask for too.
The Federal Trade Commission describes that case in its warning about rental listing scams. The fake landlord tells you to complete an application with your Social Security number, a picture of your driver’s license and your pay stubs, and then may use them to steal your identity. Across all causes, the FTC logged 1,135,291 identity theft reports in 2024.
This guide goes field by field, explains the barcode most people forget, and covers what changes between states, what to write in the watermark, how to send the copy, how to show it to an AI with nothing readable, and what to do with a passport book or passport card.
The redaction tool at the top of this page works on one screen: drop a photo of your license and everything except your name, license number and photo is covered before you touch anything. Nonimo’s homepage lists the other ID documents the tool redacts. For the wider list of personal details to remove before a file goes to an AI, there is a separate guide.
What to redact on a driver’s license, field by field
Every US license carries the same set of facts on its portrait side: name, date of birth, issue and expiry dates, the license number, the document discriminator, signature, address, vehicle class, restrictions and endorsements, sex, height and eye color. That list comes from the card design standard written by AAMVA, the association of the state and provincial motor vehicle agencies, and the back of the card adds a barcode that repeats much of it.
Which fields to cover depends on what the person receiving the copy has to check. For most requests the choices below work. The tool starts with your name, license number and photo visible and every other field covered, the DD number included; tap a field’s chip to redact or show it.
| Field | Side | On a copy you send |
|---|---|---|
| Name | Front | Leave visible |
| Photo | Front | Leave if they compare your face |
| License number | Front | Leave if requested, cover otherwise |
| Document discriminator (DD) | Front | Cover |
| Signature | Front | Cover |
| Date of birth | Front | Cover unless they verify age |
| Address | Front | Cover unless they need proof of address |
| PDF417 barcode | Back | Send the front only |
Source: AAMVA DL/ID Card Design Standard (2025), zones II, III and V.
The license number: cover it only when nobody asked for it
The number is the field people hesitate over. An insurer, an employer running a driving record check or a car rental company usually needs it, because that is how they look you up with the state. A landlord who only wants to confirm you are who you say you are often does not. If the request does not mention the number, tap its chip to cover it. If it does, leave it visible, as the tool does from the start.
The standard calls it the customer identifier and leaves its format to each state, so it can be all digits, a letter followed by digits or something longer. Whatever its shape, it points to your driving record, and it sits on the list of numbers that California treats as sensitive personal information, next to Social Security and passport numbers.
The DD number, the field nobody mentions
Most cards print a second, longer code labeled DD. AAMVA defines the document discriminator as a number that identifies this particular card among all the cards ever issued to you, and says it may also serve for audit and inventory control. Your license number follows you from card to card; the DD belongs to the plastic in your wallet.
That makes the DD the field that ties a copy to one physical card, which is what an impersonator would want to match. Nobody checking your identity from a copy needs it. Cover it every time, and the signature with it: on a copy, a signature has no job except being copied.
Don’t forget the barcode on the back of your license
Turn the card over. The block of tiny black lines on the back is a PDF417 barcode, and the AAMVA standard makes it mandatory on every compliant license, in the area it calls Zone V on the side without the portrait. According to the standard, a REAL ID card includes it primarily so state and local law enforcement can verify the document.
What it holds is the front of the card again, as text. The standard’s list of mandatory barcode elements includes your family and given names, date of birth, sex, eye color, height, street address, city, state and ZIP code, the license number and the document discriminator. The federal REAL ID rule, 6 CFR 37.19, adds its own list of 10 minimum data elements, among them the unique license number and the inventory control number of the physical card.
So a copy with the front neatly covered and the back left untouched has hidden very little. The format is public. When the request is only for the front, which is the usual case, send the front alone and leave the back out of the copy. Enhanced licenses, which a few states issue for border crossings, also carry a machine readable zone; it repeats your data as well, one more reason to keep the back out.
The same reasoning applies when the copy sits in someone else’s files. In a medical office, a scanned license on file falls under the certificate and license numbers on HIPAA’s list of identifiers, a point covered in the guide to HIPAA compliant AI.
Same fields in every state, different layouts
There are no separate rules for redacting a California, Texas or New York license, because the fields are the same everywhere. What changes is where they sit. The AAMVA standard builds in flexibility for each jurisdiction’s design: it fixes the zones and what goes in them, not the artwork, the fonts or the exact order on the card.
Two layouts are mandatory in the US. Drivers under 21 get a vertical card, and from 21 the card is horizontal. The portrait side is divided into three zones and the back into two, five zones in all, and the barcode always lives on the back. Labels vary from state to state, and some cards also print the small reference numbers from the standard beside each value, such as 4d for the license number and 5 for the DD.
That is why the tool reads the printed labels and positions instead of assuming one layout, and puts each field it reads under a chip you can tap to redact or show. A state ID card, the non driver version, follows the same standard and gets the same treatment.
If what you hold is not your own license but a column of customer license numbers, the job moves into a spreadsheet, and masking that column in a CSV export is the place to start.
Watermark a driver’s license copy: what to write and where
Covering fields keeps a copy from giving away more than it should. A watermark keeps the copy you sent from being reused anywhere else. The version that works is specific: who it is for, what for, and when.
For Maple Street lease use only · October 2026
If that copy turns up attached to a car loan application in March, the line itself says it does not belong there, and anyone who reads it can see so. A watermark that just says COPY or SAMPLE protects nothing, because it fits every use. Put it across the data, not in a corner, since a corner can be cropped off in a second.
In the tool the watermark is on from the start, with the line already suggested, and it comes in two styles; the choice depends on who receives the copy.
| Style | What it looks like | When to use it |
|---|---|---|
| Tiled | Your line repeated diagonally over the whole card | Someone you do not know well |
| Stamp | A discreet band across the card | An office you already deal with |
Either way the text is burned into the pixels of the file you download, not laid on top as a layer someone could lift off. Tiled text that runs over the fields also cannot be cropped out without cutting the data with it.
Agencies that receive these copies every week carry the other half of the risk. In the NAIC’s data security model law, which the page for insurance agencies handling claim files walks through, a driver’s license number next to a name counts as nonpublic information.
Send a copy of your driver’s license safely, redacted and watermarked
Before sending anything, check who is asking. The FTC’s rental listing warning describes scammers asking for exactly this document. If the request arrived by text, email or a listing site, contact the landlord, employer or company through a phone number or website you found yourself, and confirm they need it.
Then ask whether they need a copy at all. Plenty of checks only require seeing the card, in person or on a video call. If they do need a copy, send the redacted, watermarked version and keep the original photo out of the conversation.
By email, text or an upload portal
A company’s own upload portal is usually the better channel, since the file does not sit in an inbox that may be forwarded or breached later. Email works when it is the only option. A text or chat app leaves the photo in the conversation and in the camera roll of both phones: delete it from both once the process is over, and ask the recipient to do the same.
Two things travel with an image that you cannot see. A phone picture carries metadata, often the camera model, the time and, with location turned on, GPS coordinates; removing metadata from PDFs and photos shows where it hides. And a rectangle drawn in a PDF editor can leave the text underneath intact, as the guide to redacting a PDF properly demonstrates. The tool’s download has its boxes burned in, and the copy carries no location or camera data.
If a copy reached the wrong person
The FTC’s identity theft recovery plan says that if your license is lost or stolen, you should contact your state’s motor vehicles office. The state might flag your license number in case someone else tries to use it, or suggest that you apply for a replacement. The DD identifies one particular card, which is one more reason to keep it off every copy.
If someone is already using your details, report it at IdentityTheft.gov, which builds an identity theft report and a recovery plan from what you enter, and place a fraud alert with one of the three credit bureaus; that bureau must tell the other two.
Credit card fraud, on new and existing accounts, topped the FTC’s identity theft reports in 2024 with 449,032 of them, ahead of loans or leases with 176,400 and bank accounts with 114,608. Fraud involving government documents or benefits added 70,332.
A credit freeze goes one step further than a fraud alert, and the same recovery plan explains both. Neither replaces the first step on this page: the copy that leaves your hands with only what it needs. If the full copy went into a chatbot instead, deleting it from your ChatGPT history takes more than one button, since uploaded files are stored apart from the chat.
Passport book and passport card copies
The same logic covers a US passport, the other ID people are asked to copy. On the passport book, everything sits on the data page: photo, name, passport number, dates and place of birth, and two lines of letters, digits and chevrons along the bottom. Those lines are the machine readable zone, and they repeat the page’s data for scanners at the border.
The passport card is the wallet size version, made for land and sea travel between the US and Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and Bermuda. In the 2007 rule that created it, the State Department wrote that its RFID chip holds one item only, a unique number that has meaning only inside the CBP computer system. Your name and date of birth are not stored on the chip, so a copy is only about what is printed.
| Passport book | Passport card | |
|---|---|---|
| Made for | International travel | Land and sea: Canada, Mexico, Caribbean, Bermuda |
| Where your data is printed | The data page | Front of the card |
| Cover on a copy | Bottom lines, signature, place of birth | Card number if not requested, birth details |
| Leave visible | Name, photo, number if requested | Name, photo |
Source for the card: Federal Register, December 31, 2007, card format passport rule.
If your copy of the book shows the facing page with your signature, cover that too, and if your card carries machine readable lines on the back, treat them like the ones at the bottom of the data page. Firms that keep a passport copy in a client intake file face the same question about what stays on it, which is part of what a law firm AI policy has to settle.
Put your driver’s license into an AI with nothing readable
Sometimes the copy is not going to a person. You want ChatGPT to explain a restriction code, tell you what an endorsement means or help with a form that asks for license details. For that, also tap the chips that start visible, your name, license number and photo, so the AI sees the layout and the labels and nothing that identifies you.
What happens to an image once it reaches a chatbot depends on the provider and your plan. What OpenAI does with the files you upload and whether Claude trains on your chats are covered in their own guides. With nothing readable left on the card, that question stops mattering for this upload. If a full photo already went in, whether ChatGPT stores images after the chat is gone is the next thing to check.
Redact and watermark your license in the browser, step by step
The tool at the top of this page does the whole job on one screen, built for a phone first and just as quick on a computer.
- Add the front of the card. Drop a photo or a PDF, or choose one; on a phone that opens the camera or the gallery. JPG, PNG, WEBP, HEIC and PDF all work, multi page PDFs included.
- Check what is covered. Your name, license number and photo stay visible. The DD number, signature, date of birth, address, expiration date and other details start covered.
- Adjust the chips. Each field has its own chip; tap one to redact or show it. You can view the document only or the whole photo.
- Write the watermark. It is on by default, with a line ready to fill in: who the copy is for, then the month and year. Choose tiled or stamp, or switch it off.
- Download. Save it as PNG, JPG or PDF, with the boxes and the watermark burned in and without metadata such as EXIF and GPS.
Your document never leaves your device. It’s read and redacted right in your browser. If your license photo is saved on your computer, our Mac and Windows apps handle it too, and also recognize US passport cards.
For documents that go into AI tools every working day, Nonimo also makes a desktop app that masks client names and ID numbers before text reaches ChatGPT.
Sources
Checked October 1, 2026.
- ICAO, Doc 9303 Machine Readable Travel Documents, Part 4 (PDF). The two machine readable lines at the bottom of a passport data page.
- AAMVA, DL/ID Card Design Standard (2025). The mandatory fields on the portrait side; the document discriminator (DD) as a number that identifies a particular card issued to that customer, also usable for audit and inventory control; the vertical layout for under 21 and horizontal from 21; five zones, with the mandatory PDF417 barcode in Zone V on the non portrait side; the machine readable zone on enhanced licenses; the mandatory barcode elements, including names, date of birth, address, customer identifier and document discriminator.
- 6 CFR 37.19, Machine readable technology on the driver’s license or identification card. The REAL ID rule’s PDF417 requirement and its 10 minimum data elements, including the unique license number and the inventory control number of the physical document.
- FTC, Rental Listing Scams. Scammers may ask for an application with your Social Security number, a picture of your driver’s license and paystubs, then use the information to steal your identity.
- FTC, Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book 2024. 1,135,291 identity theft reports in 2024; by type, credit card 449,032, loan or lease 176,400, bank account 114,608, government documents or benefits 70,332.
- FTC, Identity Theft: A Recovery Plan. If a driver’s license is lost or stolen, contact the motor vehicles office, which might flag the license number or suggest a replacement; report at IdentityTheft.gov; a fraud alert placed with one credit bureau must be passed to the other two; extended fraud alerts and credit freezes.
- Federal Register, Card Format Passport, December 31, 2007. The passport card is for land and sea travel between the US and Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and Bermuda; its RFID chip holds only a unique number meaningful inside the CBP system, with no name or date of birth stored.
Common questions
What should I redact on a copy of my driver's license?
Usually the document discriminator (the DD number) and your signature, plus your date of birth and home address when the request does not need them. Name and photo normally stay visible, the license number only if they need it. When they only need the front, leave the back and its barcode out.
Should I redact my driver's license number?
Only if nobody asked for it. Insurers, employers checking your driving record and car rental companies usually need the number, because it is how they look you up with the state. A landlord who just wants to confirm who you are often does not. When the request does not mention it, cover it.
What is the DD number on a driver's license?
It is the document discriminator. The AAMVA card design standard defines it as a number that identifies this particular card among all the cards ever issued to you, and says it may also serve for audit and inventory control. No one checking your identity from a copy needs it, so cover it every time.
Why should I cover the barcode on the back of my license?
Because the PDF417 barcode repeats the front of the card as text. Under the AAMVA standard it carries your name, date of birth, address, license number and document discriminator, among other fields. A copy with the front covered and the back untouched still gives all of that away. When the front is all they need, send only the front.
How do I watermark a copy of my driver's license?
Who the copy is for, what for, and the month and year, for example: For Maple Street lease use only, October 2026. A specific line exposes the copy if it shows up anywhere else. A generic word such as COPY fits every use and protects nothing. Put it across the data, not in a corner.
Is it safe to email a copy of my driver's license?
It can be, once the copy is redacted and watermarked and you have confirmed who is asking. The FTC warns that fake landlords ask for a picture of your driver's license to steal identities. Prefer the company's own upload portal, strip the photo's metadata, and delete the image from your chats when the process is over.
Do I redact a driver's license differently in each state?
No. Layouts vary by state, and cards for drivers under 21 are vertical while the rest are horizontal, but every state follows the same AAMVA card design standard and prints the same fields. The DD number, the signature and the barcode on the back are there on all of them, so the same choices apply.
What should I cover on a passport or passport card copy?
On the passport book, cover the two machine readable lines at the bottom of the data page, your place of birth if nobody needs it, and the signature if the facing page shows. On the passport card, cover the card number unless it is requested and your birth details when they are not needed.
What do I do if I sent a copy of my license to a scammer?
Contact your state's motor vehicles office. The FTC's recovery plan says the state might flag your license number in case someone else tries to use it, or suggest a replacement license. If your details are already being misused, report it at IdentityTheft.gov and place a fraud alert with one of the three credit bureaus.
Does the photo of my license leave my phone when I use the tool?
No. Your document never leaves your device: it is read and redacted right in your browser, and the photo or PDF you drop is not uploaded, not to our servers nor anyone's. You download a PNG, JPG or PDF with the boxes and the watermark burned in, carrying no location or camera data.