RealHandles per David V. Kimball

You are on somebody's profile, or somebody's website. RealHandles tells you whether it belongs to a verified identity, and where else that identity lives.

How it decides

Open the popup on a supported page. The extension turns the address into a lookup key, matches it against its own copy of the RealHandles directory, and on a match fetches that one identity's published signed manifest and checks the signature. The verdict is what that check returned, not what a server said.

The signature check is done by @realhandles/verify, the same published open source verifier the RealHandles website and Android app run. If realhandles.com served an edited manifest, the check would fail here and the popup would say so.

What it recognizes

• Any domain
• Profiles on X, Bluesky, GitHub, YouTube and TikTok

The address of the page you are on is never sent anywhere

The obvious way to build this is to ask a server "do you know this profile?" on every page. That is a browsing-history collector wearing a privacy product's clothes, and it is not what this does.

Instead the directory is downloaded whole and matched on your machine. On the overwhelming majority of pages the answer is "no match" and nothing leaves the device at all. The download that keeps the local copy current runs once every 24 hours on a timer, deliberately not when you visit a page, because a download timed to a page visit would leak when you were looking at something worth looking up even though the bytes are identical for every user.

The extension can reach exactly one origin, realhandles.com, and only for public data: the directory index on the daily timer, and a published signed manifest for a public profile after a local match.

The answer is never drawn inside the page

There is no content script. Nothing is written into any website. A badge injected into a stranger's page is a badge that stranger can imitate with their own CSS, so the verdict lives in the toolbar icon and the popup, which the browser draws out of the extension's own package and no page can touch, read, or fake.

What it does not do

• No account, no sign-in
• No analytics, no telemetry, no advertising, no tracking
• Nothing about your browsing is written to disk: the verified manifests it caches for the current session live in memory and are gone when the browser closes

Open and checkable

RealHandles is a portable identity built on a signing key you hold, not on a login and not on a domain name. Read the whole design at realhandles.com.