Harvard, Linux Foundation launch open-source wallet for selective data sharing
Harvard, Linux Foundation launch open-source wallet for selective data sharing
Publish Date: 2026-05-05 10:26:00
Source Domain: www.biometricupdate.com
The internet is seeing a wide-scale push towards identity verification and age assurance, but the question remains: how can users ensure their privacy? Researchers at Harvard have developed their own solution, the Keyring wallet, an open-source identity verification tool that allows users to prove their identity with biometrics and choose which data they want to share with online platforms.
The wallet was launched in April by the Applied Social Media Lab (ASML) at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. It was developed in collaboration with the Linux Foundation’s Decentralized Trust and could help distinguish people from AI agents, provide age assurance and even determine the origin of certain content, according to Brendan Miller, ASML’s principal engineer.
The app is meant for everyone, from regular users who want more privacy to members of organizations that want to prove their affiliation and content publishers, influencers and journalists. Verification is performed using standard iOS and Android biometric authentication, stored on-device. Users can also add verifiable credentials such as mobile driver’s licenses (mDLs).
ASML envisions three use cases for the Keyring wallet: the first allows users to link social media profiles to prove they control a particular username on a social platform.
The team demonstrated this last year by issuing a verifiable credential from X using a browser extension called CredSnap. That credential was downloaded on the wallet and used to add proof to X’s rival BlueSky that a user controls a certain user account.
“This is something that content creators might like to do, or publishers to show that you are the same person on blue sky as you are on X,” Miller noted during the demonstration.
The second use case for Keyring is sharing information such as age in a privacy-preserving manner. For this, the wallet would rely on data from the Department of Motor Vehicles’…