Passport and driving licence checks

Passport and driving licence checks are the documents a UK event already trusts, done with the camera people already carry. Protect Events supports both, for documents issued in the United Kingdom, Ireland and the United States. A passport is the photo page. A driving licence is the front and then the back, because the back is where some of the machine-readable data lives.

There is no scanner in the box. The guest frames the document on their phone when they sign up or buy a ticket, after a guided face capture, and finishes by holding it beside their face. That sequence is the guest side of in-person identity verification.

What gets read

When the image is clear enough, the check pulls the fields the event needs: name, date of birth, expiry, and the age that follows from the date of birth. That age is compared with the minimum on the session. A passport’s machine-readable zone is read where it is visible. A licence barcode is read where the document has one. If those marks and the printed fields disagree, that is a problem with the document, not a reason to guess.

Expiry is its own check. An out-of-date passport is a decline even when the person is old enough. Under age is a decline and cannot be retried. The age rules for events are covered in age verification for events.

What waits for your team

Some problems should not be an automatic refusal. Protect Events can flag a document whose layout does not match a genuine one, whose printed design looks unlike reference examples, which shows signs of a replaced photo or edited lines, or which looks like a photograph of a screen or a printout. Those sessions go to needs review. Your team manages that pipeline and approves or declines with the images in front of you. The guest is told the check is with you. Your webhook can say the same thing if you are driving this from the API.

How to get a usable photo

Put this in the signup, not on a sign at the venue. It saves retries.

• Fill the frame. A licence floating in a dark room will fail.
• Tilt glossy cards slightly so the light is not a white block.
• Take hats, sunglasses and fingers off the portrait and off the guest’s face.
• Turn a licence over when asked. The back is not optional.
• Hold the document beside the face for the last photo, photo side out.

The guest gets three attempts inside 24 hours. That is enough for a bad photo. It is not a way to shop for a different date of birth.

What this check is not

It is not a chip authentication, and it is not a query to the issuer. If your policy requires a government database match, this product will not satisfy that sentence, and it should not be described as if it does. For an event, the practical question is narrower: is this person presenting an in-date passport or licence, are they the right age for this ticket, and does the capture look like a real document in a real hand?

That is the check. Images from it are deleted after 30 days, unless the session is still in your review pipeline.