• mipadaitu@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        The drivers license number has information about gender and birthdate encoded into it. You can see enough of the number to know that this is someone who registered as female, and has a recorded birth date of 29 July '98. I assume this person isn’t 126 years old, so we’ll say they’re 26.

        You can tell it’s an Illinois license, because no other state is as obsessed with Lincoln. (Edit: you can also read the Illinois in the seal in the back left)

        • vulture_god@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          5 days ago

          Ooh, this is fun. Another piece of data is that we have most of what appears to be the zip code, so we can get pretty close to knowing where they are located:

          • lengau@midwest.social
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            5 days ago

            Someone else with an Illinois licence could probably use that to estimate how long their address that ends with “e Ave” is and narrow it down to fewer than 8 east-west streets in this town of around 12,000.

            • naticus@lemmy.world
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              5 days ago

              Lol this whole thread is making want to find out all the encoding of my license too, but I don’t even want to ask for help because you’ll all somehow figure out my mother’s hometown, my favorite pizza shop, and the location where I had sex by myself for the first time.

            • brbposting@sh.itjust.works
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              5 days ago

              Reminds me I just learned about this: overpass-turbo.eu

              GeoGuessrs use it to run queries on OpenStreetMap (even if a chatbot has to write those queries first).

              Worked for something like “show me all houses with the house number 529 in this ZIP Code“. Oh probably saw that here (video)

        • Nasan@sopuli.xyz
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          5 days ago

          Washington does (did? [Haven’t lived there for 10+ years]) something similar with birthdate where your birth year and 2 specific digits of the ID # are supposed to add up to 100. They teach it at the class you’re required to take to get a permit to serve alcohol.

  • MothmanDelorian@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    States started doing cool things with UV ink 20+ years ago.

    My favorite thing on a license though was the microprinting on MA licenses. It looks like a bar going across the top of the license under “Massachusetts” but it is tiny printing and every second or third printing of “registry of Motor Vehicles” they intentionally misspelled “registry”.