YouID — issue your own verifiable identity card, and decide for yourself who gets to read what.
Verifiable Digital Identity · WebID · NetID

YouID

The magic of being you.

Verifiable identity, at Web and Internet scale, controlled entirely by you.

YouID is a simple — but powerful — system for generating, managing, and controlling Web- and Internet-scale verifiable identity that’s totally controlled by you. It makes you the master curator of your profile data and associated content indexes, without compromising your privacy.

Animated diagram of YouID, verifiable identity controlled by you. On the left are the places your profile data lives: a published profile document you control, an X profile page, a Substack profile page and others; later the ways to get YouID appear: on the web, as a browser extension for Firefox and Chrome, and as an iOS app. In the middle, a digital ID card carries a WebID and NetID, a key pair whose private key stays with you, and verification with PKI and DPKI, above four capabilities: verifiable identity, encrypted mail only you can read, your own access rules, and On-Behalf-Of delegation so that agents act with your authority. On the right are those who depend on it: AI agents, AI agents acting on your behalf, recipients of your messages, and attribute-based access controls. Animated diagram of YouID, verifiable identity controlled by you. On the left are the places your profile data lives: a published profile document you control, an X profile page, a Substack profile page and others; later the ways to get YouID appear: on the web, as a browser extension for Firefox and Chrome, and as an iOS app. In the middle, a digital ID card carries a WebID and NetID, a key pair whose private key stays with you, and verification with PKI and DPKI, above four capabilities: verifiable identity, encrypted mail only you can read, your own access rules, and On-Behalf-Of delegation so that agents act with your authority. On the right are those who depend on it: AI agents, AI agents acting on your behalf, recipients of your messages, and attribute-based access controls.

What the animation shows

  1. YouID: the magic of being you. Verifiable identity, at Web and Internet scale, controlled entirely by you.
  2. Issue your own digital ID card. From a profile doc you publish or a page you already have; you stay the master curator.
  3. Verifiable identity: be verifiably you. AI agents and message recipients can verify who you are.
  4. Encrypted mail only you can read. Recipients encrypt to your key, and your private key stays with you.
  5. Your own access rules. Attribute-based access controls decide who sees your images, music, contacts and profile documents.
  6. AI agents acting on your behalf. On-Behalf-Of delegation proves an agent acts with the authority of a person, organization or agent.
  7. Who depends on it? AI agents, agents acting for you, recipients of your messages, and attribute-based access controls. Be verifiably you: issue your own identity card, and decide for yourself who gets to read what.

Open the full-size animation

Open the full-size animation

Your social media and other online profiles aren’t under your full control.#

Increasingly, third parties are making decisions, theoretically on your behalf, based on their perception of you.

The Solution

An industry standards-compliant application that enables you to issue your own identity card, in a manner that scales to both the World Wide Web and the Internet.

Benefits#

YouID verifiable credentials, exploded Exploded view in which youID, a credentials generator delivered as a mobile app, browser extension and SaaS, captures credentials entered manually or from a social media provider, gives them a unique hyperlink identity, tokenizes them as an X.509 certificate stored with its private key in a PKCS#12 credential document, and publishes its SHA fingerprint, hash emoji and public key to a public profile document over HTTP. Built on open Internet and Web standards, the resulting verifiable credentials enable signed and encrypted email, resource sharing and authentication with fewer passwords. Open StandardsNATIVE TO THE INTERNET & WEBHYPERLINKS · HTTP · X.509 · PKCS#12 · PKI Credential SourcesENTERED MANUALLYYOUR PREFERRED SOCIAL MEDIA PROVIDER YouIDCREDENTIALS GENERATORMOBILE APP · BROWSER EXTENSION · SAASHYPERLINK → X.509 → PKCS#12 Your CredentialsPKCS#12 DOCUMENT: X.509 CERTIFICATE + PRIVATE KEYPUBLIC PROFILE: SHA FINGERPRINT · HASH EMOJI · PUBLIC KEY Everyday UsesSIGNED EMAIL · ENCRYPTED EMAILSHARING · AUTHENTICATION WITH FEWER PASSWORDS Privacy is an individual right that can't be offered by a 3rd party.
  • Digitally identify yourself to email recipients, while enabling them to send you encrypted email that will only be readable by you.
  • Eradicate spam and take full control over your email inboxes.
  • Create your own rules for controlling access to resources — images, music, contacts, profile documents and more — that you share on the Web or Internet.

Watch demos#

Generating an identity card from an existing social profile.

Where YouID sits#

YouID is the Identity & Trust layer of OpenLink’s architecture: cryptographically verifiable identity usable with Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and Decentralized Public Key Infrastructure (DPKI), separating identity, identification, authentication and authorization instead of conflating them.

That same foundation carries cryptographically verifiable relationships, including On-Behalf-Of delegation — which is what lets an AI Agent demonstrate that it acts with the authority of a human, an organization, or another Agent.

Be verifiably you#

Issue your own identity card, and decide for yourself who gets to read what.