Age checks with the European wallet

Europe is building a way for someone to prove with their phone that they are old enough, without showing their name or their date of birth. This article explains what that check does, what it does not do, and what you as the organiser still have to arrange yourself.

This feature is off, for the whole platform. You cannot switch it on yourself as an organisation, and as long as it is off, nothing changes in your shop, your panel or your scanning app. At the bottom you will find why.

What the check does

The visitor opens the app on their phone that holds their proof of age. That app was given that proof earlier by a recognised issuer: in most countries a government service, a bank or a telecom operator that checked their identity properly, once.

At the door they show that proof. What goes over the line is a single sentence: over eighteen: yes. Nothing more.

A proof only counts if it is signed by an issuer on the European trusted list. If the issuer is not on it, the proof does not count, however genuine it may look.

What is shared, and what is not

Shared	Not shared
One answer: yes or no to "over eighteen?"	The visitor's name
The name of the issuer that signed it	Their date of birth, and not their age either
The moment it was checked	Their identity card or any number from it
	Their photo

That is not a promise but a rule in the code: if a date of birth or a name does come along, the whole check is refused instead of the field being ignored. Ignored fields end up in a log sooner or later.

What we keep

Exactly three things: that someone is over the age asked for, when that was established, and with which issuer. No name, no date of birth, no document number — those do not even exist as columns in the database.

A result is not forever either. It lapses after half an hour, and after a week it is deleted. A phone can be in someone else's hand by then, and a proof from last week says nothing tonight.

What the check does NOT do

This is the part to read before you think you are done.

A ticket may be passed on. Whoever buys a ticket is not necessarily the person who comes in with it — that is normal and it is allowed. A proof of age therefore belongs to the person standing in front of you, not to the paper in their hand. So you can never tie an age check to a sold ticket and assume it still holds at the door.

It stays an aid for your staff, not an exemption for you. The law places the responsibility with the organiser and with whoever serves. A green screen on a phone helps your bartender — the same kind of help a scanner gives when it checks a ticket — but it does not take over their judgement and it does not remove your liability. If they have doubts, they still ask for an identity card. That is always allowed, and it should stay that way.

Nobody is obliged to have such an app. A visitor without a proof of age on their phone must simply be helped the old way. A door that only accepts phones shuts people out for the wrong reason.

Why the feature is off

Honesty first: the feature is off because it is not finished.

Building the request to the phone and checking the issuer against the European trusted list works. What is missing is verifying the signature on the proof itself. Without that verification nobody can be sure the proof is genuine.

What we deliberately did not do is build something that pretends to work. A check that always turns green is more dangerous than no check at all: your staff rely on it and you never see that something is going wrong. So as long as the verification cannot be done, the answer is "not checked", and your staff look for themselves.