RealHandles

RealHandles is identity verification you own: one handle and one public profile that prove which accounts across the internet are really yours, so a fake account impersonating you is easy to tell apart. The proof is a signature. It is not our word for it. How it works: An Ed25519 signing key is generated on your device, and that key IS the identity. Everything on your profile is a manifest signed by it, and anyone can verify that signature independently, with the open verifier, without an account and without asking us. Signing in only decides which profile you may edit. It never signs anything. The key never leaves your phone. On disk it exists only as the same encrypted backup the website produces: AES-GCM under a key derived from your passphrase with 210,000 rounds of PBKDF2. Unlocked, it lives in memory for that session and is gone when the app closes. It is never transmitted, never logged, and we could not recover it if we tried. What you can do: • Claim your username: pick a handle, generate the key that will own it, and save the encrypted backup off the app before the identity exists at all. • Prove your accounts are yours and reach Verified with GitHub sign-in, a post proof on X or TikTok, a token in a YouTube channel description, Bluesky, a Nostr signature, a wallet signature, Lightning address, control of a domain you own, or a mutual rel="me" link from a page you control. • List other accounts as Claimed, labeled honestly as unproven. • Bring an existing key onto this phone by scanning the QR code the website shows, and send it to another device as a QR code or an encrypted file. • Rotate onto a new signing key on the phone. The old key signs the handover, so your handle, accounts and history carry across, and anyone can see the change came from you, not from us. • Read the signed history of everything you publish, anchored into Bitcoin with OpenTimestamps, so the record cannot be backdated, including by us. • Export everything as JSON. • Check anyone else's handle in the app, or from the quick settings tile. What this is not, yet: These gaps are worth knowing before you rely on it. • Recovery contacts do not exist. Recovery means an Emergency Kit you generate and publish BEFORE any loss, which this app can do from the Keys screen. A rotation also leaves an anchor on your own domain holding the retired key until you replace it. • A key can only be imported by scanning a QR code, from the website's "Show as QR code" button. A saved realhandles-key.json cannot be loaded in yet, though sending one out works either way. • If you lose your key and never published a recovery key, the identity is gone. Not recoverable by you, not recoverable by us. That is the design working as intended, not a bug, and the single most important thing to understand here. • Follower counts are not in the trust score. It counts verified accounts only, and a Claimed account is worth exactly zero. Privacy: Your public profile is public on purpose. It is meant to be read, linked and machine-parsed. Accounts you mark hidden are never published. The camera is used for one thing: reading a key backup QR code, on the screen where you asked for it. Frames are scanned on your device, never stored or uploaded. Biometric unlock, if you turn it on, releases your stored passphrase from the Android Keystore on this device. Your passphrase always works on its own, and biometrics never replace it. No ads. No third-party tracking. No analytics SDK. We do not sell anything about you. Full policy: realhandles.com/privacy Delete your account: realhandles.com/account/delete RealHandles is operated by David V. Kimball LLC.