Keep Your Personal Data at Home Even When You Buy Online

Every time you create a new online account, you’re handing over personal data to a server you’ll never control. Since an average person can have hundreds of online accounts on different services, that adds up to a lot of data sitting in corporate databases.

Researchers at Harvard’s Applied Social Media Lab say that this system puts your privacy at risk and makes you more vulnerable to identity theft. Their solution to this problem is Keyring, an open-source identity wallet that stores your biometric data on your phone instead.

Think of it as a privacy-first digital ID. Rather than exposing your full details to every service you use, Keyring lets you share only what’s strictly necessary.

Services like Tinder have already started exploring biometric identity checks to check if the users are real humans. It shows how massive the identity problem has become across platforms on the internet.

So, if you want to verify you’re an adult, Keyring will verify that without revealing your actual birthdate. Or maybe you need to get an email account verification done; Keyring can also do that for you without exposing your username.