Children and digital identity

The Identity Wallet is designed for people aged 18 and over. This is a hard rule inherited from the terms that govern the underlying network, and it exists for good reasons: identity verification involves biometric data, and children's biometric data deserves stronger protection than any general-purpose system should ask for.

• You must be at least 18 (or the age of legal majority where you live, if higher) to set up a wallet.
• Verification requires a government-issued identity document, which acts as a practical age gate.
• No child-specific accounts, parental-consent flows or family wallets exist in the current system.

If a child has used your documents to attempt verification, contact the data protection officer at dpo@virtengine.com so any collected data can be located and deleted. Deletion requests involving minors are prioritised.

If you are teaching young people about digital identity, the concepts on this site — data minimisation, consent, proving without revealing — are good foundations, and the how-it-works section is written to be readable without technical background.

Digital identity for minors raises design questions — guardianship, evolving capacity, the right to a clean slate at adulthood — that are active areas of policy research. Any future change in this area would go through the Foundation's public governance process before a line of code changed.