Overview
The OpenPrivacy initiative is a Free and Open Source collection of software frameworks, protocols and services providing a cryptographically secure and distributed platform for community building and communications, as well as creating, maintaining, and selectively sharing user profile information.
Key features:
- Pseudonymous Identity (Nyms): Users communicate using cryptographic keys ("nyms") rather than real-world identities, ensuring anonymity by default.
- Compartmentalized Relationships (Child Nyms): Users can generate unique, untraceable child nyms for each personal contact, platform, or service, ensuring that separate interactions cannot be correlated while maintaining a provable relationship to the parent nym owner.
- Locally Managed Trust & Petnames: Trust is established through a decentralized web-of-trust and personally defined metrics, allowing individuals to attach familiar petnames (e.g., “Mom” or “John (work)”) to nyms just like smartphone contact lists.
- Distributed and User-Controlled Framework: Communications and profile sharing take place across a cryptographically secure, distributed platform where all access is governed strictly at user discretion rather than by centralized authorities.
We are interested in finding people who would like to help with any and all of these projects. OpenPrivacy is a grassroots effort creating open source (and free) code. Our goal is to create a saner, safer Internet.
- Sierra, a reference implementation of the Reputation Management Framework (RMF)
- OpenPrivacy's core project is designed to ease the process of creating community with reputation enhanced pseudonymous entities. The RMF is primarily a set of four interfaces: Nym Manager, Communications Manager, Storage Manager and Reputation Calculation Engine (RCE). Sierra is a reference implementation that meets these interfaces.
- Talon
- A simple yet powerful component system for Java. Sierra is being developed using Talon and we expect that Talon will soon be able to use Sierra's reputation manager to drive component selection
- Zero-knowledge proof of sibling nym relationships by parent
- paper forthcoming
- Reputation Capital Exchange
- A secure mechanism for mapping between RCEs that use different trust metrics. This is accomplished by first attaching an OpenPrivacy-style Nym to the local namespace user name, and then by authenticating a match between these secure nyms.
- Reptile
- An open source/free software Syndicated Content Directory Server (SCDS) that provides a personalized news and information portal with privacy and reputation accumulation.
- User Content License - Reversing the Privacy Policy Circle
- Adding an HTTP header prior to the request being transferred from client to server that contains a user copyright notice for any data transferred from the client. (While not directly related to the concept of anonymous profile data, we think it's a cool hack!)
Longer Term Goals
The OpenPrivacy platform enables applications that will afford the user many direct benefits without the loss of privacy or fear that their data is being used inappropriately, including the ability to:- provide a standard framework (objects and protocols) for general purpose reputation management
- enjoy the benefits (TBD: describe) of personalized information without loss of privacy
- browse (if and when they chose) offers from businesses and marketers
- respond to offers directly or through third party infomediaries
- maintain confidence that their profile is being used only as permitted
- understand and leverage the value of their profile information
