Relay Overview
What is Relay?
Relay is Persona’s privacy-preserving verification product. Instead of collecting and returning identity data, Relay confirms a specific claim — is this person over 18? is this a real human? — and returns only the result. The platform gets the answer it needs to enforce its policy without directly handling PII.
Once a claim result is produced, Persona deletes the underlying verification data.
How it works
Built on Privacy Pass (an open IETF standard), Relay cryptographically separates the verification step from the result redemption step — so no single party ever sees both who a user is and what they’re doing.
When a user hits a gated experience, Relay evaluates the configured requirement and runs a verification flow. Once complete, the platform receives a pass/fail claim result, without the underlying identity data.
What each party knows
What makes Relay privacy-preserving?
- Minimal disclosure — only the data needed to answer the claim question is shared and verified
- Claim results only — organizations receive a single eligibility result, nothing more
- Data deletion — Persona deletes verification data once the claim result is produced
- Double-blind architecture — cryptographically separates the customer and Persona, so that neither party can correlate the user’s website activity with their identity data — not just a policy promise
