Selective Disclosure as Public Infrastructure: Verifying the Disability Card at Every Counter

Indonesia has just completed a ten-year legislative arc. The Disability Law (UU 8/2016) promised concessions; this July, PP 31/2026 delivered the implementing regulation, mandating discounts of at least 20 percent across nine sectors, from education and transport through health, assistive devices, housing, employment, entrepreneurship, tourism, and sport, with larger concessions where a pendamping (companion) is needed. The instrument is the Kartu Penyandang Disabilitas (KPD, the national disability card), physical and virtual, issued by the Ministry of Social Affairs from the DNPD (Data Nasional Penyandang Disabilitas, the national disability registry), itself verified out of DTSEN, the same national socioeconomic register that anchors our micro-enterprise eligibility use case. Of nearly 15 million persons with disabilities recorded in DTSEN, over four million had been verified and issued cards at launch, with full coverage targeted by 2027. The issuance rail is built and filling.

The verification rail is not, and that is where the right meets the counter. Nine sectors of state enterprises, regional operators, and private businesses now legally owe a discount to anyone presenting a KPD, and almost none of them can check one. So the counter improvises, and every improvisation runs the same direction: show the card, and with it your name, your identity number, your disability. Photocopies kept for the audit file. Logbooks of who claimed the discount and why. Under the Personal Data Protection Law (UU PDP 27/2022), health and disability data sit in the most protected category, data pribadi spesifik, and processing a disabled person's data requires specific consent. The concession regime, as it stands, quietly asks a warung-scale merchant to become a processor of the most sensitive personal data in Indonesian law, or to refuse the discount. Both happen. The person carrying the card pays either way: in privacy surrendered at every transaction, or in entitlements that exist on paper and evaporate at the counter. A right that must be claimed by disclosure is a right taxed at every use.

The missing layer inverts the transaction. Instead of the person showing everything so the counter can check one thing, the counter asks one question and receives one answer.

The KPD becomes presentable as a verifiable credential: a digitally signed attestation from the national disability registry that the holder is entitled to the concession. At the counter, a tap or QR scan generates a proof disclosing only what the transaction needs, entitled yes or no, the applicable sector, companion entitlement where relevant, and nothing else. No name, no identity number, no disability type. The verifier's system checks the signature against the issuer's public key and gets its answer in seconds, offline if the connection is down, which for rural counters is a design requirement rather than a feature. Nothing is stored, so there is nothing to photocopy, leak, or subpoena; the merchant gets a cryptographic receipt that a valid concession was honoured, which serves the audit and any incentive claim under PP 31/2026 without holding a single personal record. This is not speculative architecture: the European Union is implementing its Disability Card in exactly this pattern, a wallet-held credential proving disability status to a transport site or museum with a single tap, and it is the canonical selective-disclosure case in the Centre for Digital Public Infrastructure's credentialing model: issuers attest, holders present, verifiers check, and data moves minimally.

The division of labour follows the pattern of every use case on this site. The DTSEN-to-DNPD pipeline remains the sole authority on who is entitled; the credential layer makes that decision portable. Eligibility policy stays with government; the layer carries no opinion about who qualifies. And the design must be accessible to its own holders, wallet interfaces usable across disabilities, assisted presentation for those who need it, and the physical card retained as a full fallback, designed with disability organisations rather than for them.

Two public rails come out of this. The first completes existing infrastructure: the KPD's issuance rail gains the read side it currently lacks, and four million issued cards become four million usable ones. The second is new and reaches past disability entirely: an open verification protocol and verifier registry, the standard by which any Indonesian counter checks any government-issued credential without touching the data behind it. Our micro-enterprise eligibility use case needs precisely this rail from the other direction; built once here, it is inherited there. The condition, as always, is governance: the protocol must be openly specified and publicly owned, or the pilot produces one more app.

We are inviting partners to scope a bounded first pilot: one sector of the nine, one credential presentation flow, one cohort of verifying providers, with the verification protocol published openly from day one. Which sector anchors the pilot is the convening's first decision; the regulation makes all nine live at once, and the partners at the table know better than a concept note where a bounded pilot proves the most.

Three roles need filling. Problem owners: the custodians of the entitlement, the Ministry of Social Affairs as issuer of the KPD and keeper of the DNPD, the sector ministries whose concession rules the credential must encode, and the disability community's own institutions, whose oversight makes the privacy promise credible. Adopters: the operators, pharmacies, venues, and merchants whose counters would run the verification, and the disability organisations whose members must find the presentation usable, since a rail no holder can operate is not a rail. And partners able to mobilise resources for a time-bound pilot, distinct from the card and registry themselves, which remain government-owned. The Alliance's role is to convene, matchmake, and carry lessons across sectors. If your institution fits one of these roles, we want to hear from you.