FAQ
Questions people ask first.
Short answers, each with a link to the page that shows the detail.
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Passports and the law
What is a Digital Product Passport?
A digital record that stays with a product for its whole life: what it is made of, where it came from, and how to repair and recycle it. Anyone reaches the public part by scanning a code on the product.
EU law is making passports compulsory one product group at a time.
Do my products need one, and from when?
It depends on the product group. Electric-vehicle, light-transport and larger industrial batteries need one from 18 February 2027, detergents from 23 September 2029 and toys from 1 August 2030. New vehicles need their own vehicle passport from 1 September 2032. Most other product groups get their date from a Commission act that has not been adopted yet.
The regulations page lists every act the software tracks and where each date comes from. It is a summary, not legal advice.
Does the software tell me whether I comply?
It checks every passport against its product group's rules before signing, and warns about values that look implausible. Where a rule cannot be assessed yet, because the law behind it does not apply yet, it says so rather than guessing.
It supports your compliance work. It does not replace legal advice.
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Your data
Where is my data kept?
On your own node, on servers you choose. Your product data is checked, signed with your own key and stored there, and the signed passport is served from there.
Can Odal see my data?
Not when you run your own node. We have no access to its servers, its database or its signing keys, and checking a passport does not involve us.
Who can read my passports?
Anyone can read the public part by scanning the code on the product, with no login and no fee. Other parts are shown only to the readers the law names, such as market surveillance authorities or readers with a legitimate interest, and they prove who they are with a credential.
What each reader may see is set separately for each product group.
What if my server goes down?
A signed copy of each public page can be kept outside the node, so a scan still reaches the passport while the node is down.
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Getting started
How does product data get in?
From the spreadsheets you already have. Import a CSV or Excel file with a trial run first, and the node reports any problems row by row instead of rejecting the whole file. Import covers most product groups today.
What does it cost?
Running the node for your own organisation's passports is free, and so is the open-source core library. Offering the node to others as a hosted service, or shipping it inside a competing product, needs a commercial licence.
Do I have to run it myself?
Today, yes. The node runs on infrastructure you choose: you build our setup tool once, and it sets up and starts the node. A node run for you is being considered, and it would still be yours alone: one company, one node, nothing shared.
Is it ready to use?
Odal Node is in alpha and in active development. Everything marked as available on the roadmap is built and tested, and nobody runs it in production yet.
The roadmap shows what is ready, what is in progress and what is planned.
Can it apply qualified electronic seals and register passports with the EU?
Sealing is built and tested end to end, and every seal the node makes today says plainly that it is not qualified. A qualified seal, which the law presumes intact and from its stated origin, needs a qualified certificate issued to the company that seals, and only a legal person, such as a registered company, can hold one.
Registering passports in the EU registry needs the operator's legal identity too. The connection will be finished against the registry's official interface.
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Trust
How can anyone check that a passport is genuine?
Every passport is signed. Its proof file holds the passport, its signatures and its full history, and anyone can check it offline, in their own browser, without trusting us.
Which standards does it use?
Open ones: GS1 Digital Link for the code on the product, web-based identities for signatures, W3C Verifiable Credentials for proving who a reader is, and the Asset Administration Shell for industrial systems.
More
Where to go next.
The documentation covers the technical side, and the roadmap is updated whenever something moves.