# RealHandles

> Tells you whether the profile or site you are looking at belongs to a verified RealHandles identity. The match happens on your device against a downloaded copy of the directory, so the address of the page you are on is never transmitted.

Canonical page: [https://chrome-stats.com/d/realhandles](https://chrome-stats.com/d/realhandles)

## Overview

- **ID:** `realhandles`
- **Platform:** Firefox
- **Type:** Firefox add-on
- **Status:** Available
- **Publisher:** David V. Kimball
- **Category:** privacy-security,social-communication
- **Daily users:** 1
- **Version:** 0.1.0
- **Last updated:** 2026-08-18
- **First published:** 2026-08-15
- **Size:** 47 KB
- **Data as of:** 2026-09-08
- **Store listing:** [Firefox Add-ons Store](https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/realhandles/)
- **Website:** [https://realhandles.com](https://realhandles.com/)
- **Privacy policy:** [https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/realhandles/privacy/](https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/realhandles/privacy/)

## Description

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

<strong>How it decides</strong>

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. <em>The verdict is what that check returned, not what a server said.</em>

The signature check is done by <a href="https://prod.outgoing.prod.webservices.mozgcp.net/v1/f85901e512646e02b89c3001c6d8fe2a57e31d199994e56fad8b60c72447a471/https%3A//www.npmjs.com/package/%40realhandles/verify" rel="nofollow">@realhandles/verify</a>, the same published open source verifier the RealHandles website and Android app run. If <a href="https://prod.outgoing.prod.webservices.mozgcp.net/v1/2c2ba437125fbb5eaf60e36917154dd8b7cf5e2f84fbfbd9d33f9859ab247c39/http%3A//realhandles.com" rel="nofollow">realhandles.com</a> served an edited manifest, the check would fail here and the popup would say so.

<strong>What it recognizes</strong>
<ul><li>Any domain</li><li>Profiles on X, Bluesky, GitHub, YouTube and TikTok</li></ul>
<strong>The address of the page you are on is never sent anywhere</strong>

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 <strong>nothing leaves the device at all</strong>. The download that keeps the local copy current runs once every 24 hours on a timer, deliberately <em>not</em> 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, <a href="https://prod.outgoing.prod.webservices.mozgcp.net/v1/2c2ba437125fbb5eaf60e36917154dd8b7cf5e2f84fbfbd9d33f9859ab247c39/http%3A//realhandles.com" rel="nofollow">realhandles.com</a>, 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.

<strong>The answer is never drawn inside the page</strong>

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.

<strong>What it does not do</strong>
<ul><li>No account, no sign-in</li><li>No analytics, no telemetry, no advertising, no tracking</li><li>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</li></ul>
<strong>Open and checkable</strong>

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 <a href="https://prod.outgoing.prod.webservices.mozgcp.net/v1/3cee5530f8f0886f196f0f276bde8b672e9a102efd423e36386b45ee7c12b030/https%3A//realhandles.com" rel="nofollow">realhandles.com</a>.

## Rankings

- #127,167 — Overall
- #64 — handle

## Permissions and access

### Permissions

- `tabs`
- `storage`
- `alarms`

### Host permissions

- `https://realhandles.com/*`

## Safety

- **Risk impact:** Moderate risk impact
- **Risk likelihood:** High risk likelihood

### Analysis details

- Grants access to browser tabs, which can be used to track user browsing habits and history, presenting a privacy concern.
- This extension was recently updated in the past month. New updates may not be stable or safe.

> Some risk analysis details are omitted from this free response. [Upgrade to view the full analysis](https://chrome-stats.com/pricing).

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Source: [Chrome-Stats](https://chrome-stats.com/d/realhandles)