The Three Access Levels of a Digital Product Passport
A Digital Product Passport that shows everyone everything is either useless or dangerous. The interesting design question isn’t “what’s in the passport” — it’s who gets to see and write which parts. That’s what least-privilege, multilevel access solves.
Why one passport needs many views
A buyer wants to confirm a product is authentic. The owner wants a private layer tied to their specific unit. A recycler at end-of-life needs the material breakdown and nothing about the owner. A repairer needs to record what they fixed. If a passport exposed all of that to everyone, it would leak private data and drown each party in fields they can’t use. The DPP Resolver gives each role exactly what it needs — and nothing more.
The three levels
1. Public
Anyone who scans the identifier sees what builds trust without exposing anyone: authenticity, material and origin, the key lifecycle milestones, and the passport’s verification status — is it signed, by whom, and does it check out. This is the layer that makes a product trustworthy to a stranger.
2. Owner
The current owner unlocks a private layer bound to their piece. Ownership can transfer with the product across a resale, so the private layer follows the object, not an account.
3. Circular-economy actors
Verified repairers, remanufacturers, resellers and recyclers get a role-scoped view — the specific fields their work requires — and, crucially, the right to write the events they perform. A repair, a resale, a recycling event: each is recorded by the party who actually did it, which is what makes those events worth trusting later.
Least privilege is what makes a passport safe to publish
Least privilege isn’t a compliance checkbox bolted on at the end; it’s the precondition for a passport being both public and useful. It lets you expose authenticity to the world while keeping owner data private, and it lets a whole ecosystem of actors contribute to a product’s record without stepping on each other. It also maps directly onto the access and portability rights the EU Data Act is establishing.
Access that lasts a lifetime
Because roles and rights travel with the product, the passport stays useful long after the first sale — through every repair, resale and, eventually, recycling. That continuity is the point: see how it plays out in verifiable second life.
Passports with access you control
Public trust, private ownership, role-scoped rights for the circular economy — on open standards.