Verify once. Never hand your ID to another website.

Rarely, because the site, or one of its verification vendors, then holds a copy of your most sensitive document, and any of them can store, mishandle, or leak it. In October 2025 a breach at a Discord support vendor exposed around 70,000 uploaded government-ID photos. The safest check is one where no site ever receives your documents at all.

Yes. With Passwave you verify once, privately, and from then on a site that needs an age check receives a simple yes or no, never a copy of your passport or ID card. There is nothing for the site to store, so there is nothing for it to lose.

Because in more and more places it's the law. The UK's Online Safety Act has required strong age checks since July 2025, enforced by Ofcom, and around half of US states now have age-verification laws of their own. The checks aren't going away; the open question is how they're done, and what they cost you in personal data.

There's no catch, and no advertising business behind it. Over-18 checks are free because websites pay for extras: richer fields, higher volume and support. They are never charged per check, and you are never charged to verify with your document's chip. We don't sell data about you, what you provided, or where you verified. Here's the whole list.

Passports and national ID cards from most countries, read straight from the chip. If you don't have a chip, have an older phone, or a document we can't read yet you can verify with an ID check provider instead: a one-off €3.99 that includes two attempts. Either way you're in. Unlike wallet-based checks, nobody gets turned away. See which countries we read today.

Only what you choose to tell us. A share is held in memory for at most ten minutes and erased the moment the site collects its answer. What stays is a record of the share itself: which service, when, and any follow-up question it asked, kept for 90 days and two years respectively, for you. The app shows you that list and lets you cut a service off. We never see which websites you visit: a service asks us from its own servers, never from your browser.

With other services it can be. Some systems can tie your identity to the specific sites and content you access, which is why privacy campaigners object to document-based checks. A Passwave share tells the site you're over 18 and nothing else, and we never see your browser: what we keep is a record of the services you chose to share with, shown to you in the app, never a record of where you go online.

Passwave lets you prove you're over 18, or that you're one real person and not a bot, without handing your documents to every website that asks. You verify once, and from then on sites get only the answer they need, never your ID. Because sites using Passwave never collect your documents, there's no stockpile of IDs waiting to be breached.