Europe’s digital ID, the European Digital Identity Wallet, is voluntary. Paper documents stay valid. Nobody has to install anything. Brussels repeats this so often that it has started to sound like a warning label, and the way voluntary schemes tend to end is a good reason to read it as one.
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A digital ID launch nobody is ready for
Under Regulation (EU) 2024/1183 every member state must offer citizens at least one certified wallet by 24 December 2026. According to Euronews, as relayed by Brussels Signal in September, 24 of the 27 states are expected to miss that date.
Italy is the only country with real scale, at almost eight million monthly users. Germany plans to launch on 2 January 2027. The Netherlands pushed its rollout to late 2027 after a pilot drew 57 users. Bulgaria is still drafting the national law it needs to issue a wallet at all.
Italy’s number is the one to watch. If adoption elsewhere follows the same route, it will come through the services that ask for the wallet.
Voluntary for you, compulsory for them
Citizens may choose. Businesses may not. From 24 December 2027 companies must accept the wallet, and banks face an earlier date of July 2027 because of anti-money-laundering rules. The Commission wants 80 per cent of citizens using a digital identity solution by 2030.
Put those pieces together. A system nobody must use, which every bank and many businesses must accept, and which the Commission wants almost everyone using within four years. Nobody forces you. The queue at the bank, the form on the website and the login that offers a wallet button and a worse alternative will do it for them.
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The British lesson
Look at how quickly “voluntary” can move. In September 2025 the British government announced that from 2029 a digital ID would be mandatory as proof of the right to work, and Prime Minister Keir Starmer said plainly that people without one would not be able to work.
In January 2026 it dropped that requirement. The Register reported that the scheme would now lean towards access to public services for the whole population, that digital right-to-work checks were still planned, and that the project might cost as much as £1.8 billion.
The UK is outside the EU, and the point travels anyway. Within four months a compulsory scheme became an optional one with a different justification, and the machinery stayed. A wallet that exists, is funded and is accepted everywhere can be repurposed by the next government with one amendment.
The privacy promises are being edited
The regulation contains three privacy safeguards: selective disclosure, unlinkability and issuer blindness. In plain words, you show only what is needed, two uses cannot be tied together, and the issuer cannot see where you use the wallet.
The digital rights groups EDRi and epicenter.works argue that the Commission is weakening those safeguards through implementing acts, which sit outside the ordinary legislative procedure and get a fraction of the scrutiny. They point to two changes. Revocation mechanisms now need only to hinder linkability instead of preventing it, and a facial image has been added to the minimum data set every wallet must carry.
On 18 June member states agreed that national authorities may make the portrait optional. Campaigners say nothing obliges them to. Choose your own adjective for a safeguard that depends on the goodwill of twenty-seven ministries.
The age check is already in the pipeline
In April the Commission urged states to adopt its age-verification app and designed that tool to be folded into national wallets. A tool built to prove you are over eighteen may well be the first thing most people use the wallet for, and the first thing that teaches the habit.
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Child safety supplies the first justification. Banking, travel and public services will supply the next. Each is reasonable alone, and together they make the wallet ordinary before anyone has voted on ordinary.
What to demand while the launch is late
The delay is the useful part of this story. It gives capitals time to shape the specification before it hardens. Use it for four things.
Write the three privacy safeguards into the regulation itself, out of reach of committee implementing acts. Forbid any service that can function without a wallet from making it the only way in. Make the portrait optional in law, not by courtesy. Publish in plain language what the wallet reveals to issuers.
If Brussels says all of this is unnecessary because the wallet is voluntary, then putting that sentence into the law costs nothing. A promise that cannot survive being written down was never meant to last.
Opinion pieces on ExtraFokus.eu reflect the views of their authors.
