How giving away our most valuable asset delivers on our mission

This week we did something companies are not supposed to do. We took the most valuable piece of engineering Cirdia owns and published the entire design into the commons.

It's called a technical disclosure. It lives on TDCommons, which is where engineers put inventions they want the world to be able to use forever. Anyone can read it. Any company can build with it. And this works as prior art so that patent offices can find it, which should mean that nobody can ever patent it and fence it off. Including us.

Here is why we're celebrating: sharing this architecture, not holding onto it, is aligned with the entire purpose of this company. We want to see more apps built with privacy guaranteed at the level of architecture not just policy.

We have a distinction that has been present but unnamed for our entire existence. People's data is two completely different things and deserves two completely different kinds of handling. There's contact data: your name, your email, your billing details. Every company needs that to run your account, and we hold ours the ordinary way (and it's protected by GDPR processes and good security). And there's confided data. When you open a period-tracking app and log that you had sex on Tuesday, that you're trying to conceive, that your libido has disappeared, or that you took the morning-after pill, you are typing a confession almost always into a centralised database. People do this because the apps are useful, and because it feels private. It isn't.

We created Cirdia to build products that support people's wellbeing and which also ensure that what you confide never sits on our servers. That data lives on your phone, and if it needs to leave there for sense-making, as it does in the Tapestry app for the Week in Wellness report generation, the processing happens in one short-lived place that's destroyed when it's done. Nothing is kept.

Here's the problem with privacy promises not backed by architecture. Every company makes them. 'We take your privacy seriously' gets printed on the same pages as the breach notifications. A privacy policy is a promise, and promises change hands when companies change hands. At Cirdia, we don't want you to simply take our word for any of this, and this is one way we ensure you don't have to. Our design is public. Security researchers, regulators, other builders, people who've never heard of us and have no reason to trust us, they can all check it now.

So that's the celebration. Not simply the publishing, but what it represents. The fact that the values we started with are ones we can keep living in public, and that anyone else who wants to build this way now can.

For the curious and the technical, Mary's written an article about this on her personal blog: PIE in the Sky

Also, if you want all 18 pages, you can find the disclosure itself: https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/11179/

Hold the contact. Never hold the confided.