Document shares
A person can hand anyone a link to one verified document or to their verified details. These are the public routes that link opens.
A link the person made
From their own portal a person can create a time-limited link to one of their verified identity documents, or to a set of their verified personal details, and give it to anybody — a landlord, an employer, you. The link is theirs; there is no developer route that creates one.
What the link opens is a public, unauthenticated route, which is why it is on this site: if a person sends your service such a link, this is how you read it.
Opening one
GET /v1/public/document-shares/{shareId}- One identity document.
GET /v1/public/document-shares/personal-information/{shareId}- A set of verified personal details.
POST …/{shareId}/unlock- The same, for a link the person protected with a password: send
{ password }(1–72 bytes) in the body, so the password is never in a URL, a referrer or a log. The GET answers{ "passwordRequired": true }first.
curl -s "$UNIFYID_API/v1/public/document-shares/$SHARE_ID"A document link, under data
legalName, age, nationality- The holder, as verified.
ageis a number, not a birth date. documentType, documentNationality- What the document is and who issued it.
documentNumber, documentNumberMasked- The number — masked to its last four characters unless the person chose, after a warning, to show it in full, in which case
documentNumberMaskedisfalse. issueDate, expiryDateYYYY-MM-DD, or null.verified- Always
true: a document that is not verified, is deleted or has expired stops answering. expiresAt- When the link stops working.
What stops a link answering
A document link answers DOCUMENT_SHARE_NOT_FOUND, and a personal-information link SHARE_NOT_FOUND, both status 404, when it has expired, when the person revoked it, when the document was removed, superseded or has expired, and when the holder's own account is no longer verified or in good standing. All of those look the same from outside, on purpose.
A wrong password is SHARE_PASSWORD_INVALID. Password attempts are limited to ten per fifteen minutes per address, in a bucket separate from opening links, so guessing at one link cannot spend another's allowance.
Every view is recorded on the person's ledger as a release of the fields shown, and the country it was opened from is noted for them. Every response carries Cache-Control: no-store and X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow.
What this does not do
- A share link is not a sign-in. It carries no
sub, no token, and no consent your application could later read against. It is a document the person showed you once. - Do not store the link. It expires, and reading it again is another recorded view of the person's document. Store what you needed from it, under your own retention rules.
Verified against API commit 234dba22 on 2026-10-18. The routes, scopes, checklist, events and limits on these pages are read from that export, not typed.