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Privacy & security: How it works

How does it work

Login.gov encrypts your personal information in transit and at rest and asks you before sharing your data with a partner agency. In order to reuse identity assurance credentials across government websites Login.gov continues to work toward achieving certification of compliance with NIST’s IAL2 standard from a third-party assessment organization.

During identity proofing, the ID is also checked for authenticity. Then, the personal information is validated with the issuing source (ex: state DMVs) or authoritative sources (ex: credit, financial, telephone records). These external services do not retain any personal information, they are only used for validation purposes. Given these stringent requirements, Login.gov currently supports state IDs and federal government employee IDs. Over time, Login.gov will support additional IDs.

Your address is also validated during this process. This can be done remotely using a telephone number associated with the address or through a letter with an enrollment code sent to the account holder’s address. Please note, the enrollment code is valid for 30 days. (5-10 days for the letter to be delivered along with 10 days to complete address validation on https://secure.login.gov). Once validated, Login.gov identity credentials are encrypted with the account holder’s password. Encryption ensures that only you, the account holder, can access your information with your password.

Protecting your privacy through encryption does come at a cost. Login.gov operators, such as our Contact Center team, cannot make changes on your behalf like unlocking your account, changing your password or updating your email address or phone number. We encourage you to safeguard your authentication method for this reason. While this means Login.gov cannot provide that level of customer support, if we chose to make these options available to our customer support team, it would make our system more vulnerable to hacking and other bad actors.

The information you give Login.gov will be shared with the applicable partner agency to provide access to information about you held by that agency as described in the associated systems of records notices. Please note that the Login.gov system will record certain session-level information about your use of the service, including but not limited to, web browser type and version, and the length of your session. This information allows Login.gov to better understand how the site is being used and how it can be made more helpful.

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