Worried about how online firms use data they get from you? Berkman Klein researchers unveil new tool to verify identity, let users limit information they share, where it is stored In our increasingly online lives, convenience has come at a cost. The average person has more than 100 online accounts, and creating a new one often requires handing over personal information like an email address or a birthdate. Researchers at the Applied Social Media Lab at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society say the current system puts your privacy at risk and makes you more vulnerable to identity theft, and they have a plan to fix it. As part of a digital identity symposium in April, engineers from ASML launched the Keyring wallet, an open-source identity verification tool. Rather than surrendering personal data to be stored in corporate databases, Keyring lets users keep their information on their mobiles and disclose only what is absolutely necessary to verify who you are. “Identity is actually deeply personal,” said ASML principal investigator James Mickens, Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “Your age, your name, your location, your gender — all of these are inextricably tied to you as the user, not to some company or some particular piece of technology.” “We were handed a problem nobody had solved. We had no UX patterns, no templates, no precedent. And we built something that a real person can pick up and use in seconds.” Nicole Brennan, senior UX designer During the symposium, researchers described what they see as an increasingly insecure digital identity ecosystem. Meg Marco, senior director of ASML, said individuals have too much data spread out over too many accounts they don’t fully control. “This is important, not only because