Digital identity

A digital identity is the set of attributes that officially represent a person — name, date of birth, nationality, an identifier — in a form that can be proven electronically.

Identity is not a login

An account proves you can get back into a service. An identity proves something about you that a third party vouched for. The two are often confused because logins have historically stood in for identity, badly.

	Account	Identity credential
Vouched for by	The service you registered with	An authoritative issuer
Portable	No	Yes, to any verifier
Proves	You hold the password	The attributes themselves

Person Identification Data

PID is the base credential in the EUDI ecosystem: the core attributes a member state asserts about a person, issued to their wallet after they prove who they are once. Everything else — a driving licence, a diploma, a professional licence — layers on top of it.

Identity is a bundle

You rarely need all of it. A verifier confirming a customer is an adult needs one fact, not a name and address. See Selective disclosure.