Getting started

Create your VirtualID, add a few fields, and share your first profile — in a couple of minutes, with no password and no verification email.

1. Create your identity

VirtualID accounts are username-first and email-optional. You never need to give an email address to sign up — email (and phone, address, and so on) are optional fields you can add later, never a signup gate.

1. Pick a username / handle. This is your identity. Live hints show the allowed characters and length.
2. Click Next. VirtualID checks availability (POST /auth/username/check). If it's free the field turns green.
3. Click Create passkey. Your browser prompts you to create a passkey with Face ID, Touch ID, Windows Hello, or a hardware security key.
4. You're logged in instantly — no password, no confirmation step.

2. Add fields

Your identity holds fields — name, email, phone, company, medical details, government IDs, and custom fields you define. VirtualID ships a seeded field catalogue of standardized field types with per-country validation, plus a few custom fields of your own.

Each field has a sensitivity. High-sensitivity fields (medical, government IDs, insurer/policy) are protected differently at rest — see Security & privacy.

3. Build a profile

A profile is a purpose-scoped view of your identity — e.g. Work or Public. You control, per profile, which fields are exposed. VirtualID is default-deny: a new profile exposes nothing until you turn fields on.

Use the preview ("what a subscriber sees") to confirm exactly what a given profile reveals before you share it.

4. Share it

Generate a share link + QR code for a profile. Links can be:

• Temporary — expiring after a time or a number of uses.
• Permanent — for a business card, RFID tag, or a public profile.

You can revoke any link immediately; printed or embedded copies (QR/RFID) go dark at once.

5. Someone subscribes

When another VirtualID user redeems your link, they subscribe to that profile. Depending on your setting, subscriptions are auto-approved or wait for your explicit approval. Once approved, the subscriber sees your fields — and gets live updates when you change them (an event tells them something changed; their client then pulls the new data).

6. Keep your contacts

Profiles you subscribe to appear in My Contacts. You can search them (fully client-side), attach multiple timestamped private notes and labels (encrypted to you — the other person and the server can't read them), and see added / last-synced times and a stale/not-syncing flag.

7. Export

Take a one-time vCard snapshot of a contact for your address book. Deferred Automatic CardDAV refresh is planned post-MVP; the MVP ships the manual vCard export as the groundwork.