No open, privacy-preserving attribute-verification infrastructure independent of the state digital ID

Online Safety Act age-assurance duties pushed millions of users through proprietary age-verification providers from July 2025. The government's digital ID consultation closed in June 2026, with a People's Panel concluding on 21 June, and the incoming government scrapped the scheme a month later. Identity checks keep spreading anyway, through age assurance, right-to-work and private verification. The DIATF trust framework certifies providers like Yoti and does not mandate unlinkability or selective disclosure. No open-source, zero-knowledge attribute-proof standard exists for UK services to adopt freely. ORG and Big Brother Watch critique the schemes, and nobody builds the alternative.

Identity checks are becoming ubiquitous across age, work and services. Each new check without privacy-preserving rails adds surveillance infrastructure and another single point of failure. An open selective-disclosure standard is the difference between proving a fact about yourself and handing over the document that proves everything else too.

An open, DIATF-certified selective-disclosure credential standard using zero-knowledge proofs of age and right-to-work, with a funded open-source reference implementation, mandated as an accepted option in OSA age-assurance guidance and in the digital ID scheme.

// Build now: First artefact: open-source selective-disclosure spec and reference implementation; DIATF certification and Ofcom mandate are the state-led end-state.

Identity checks are hardening into surveillance rails, nobody is building the open alternative, and the state wallet's architecture is being decided now, before unlinkability can be designed in.