RosaTrust, in plain terms.
A metaphor-free companion to the Trust Society pages. Those pages tell you why; this one tells you what it is, what it does, and what it never does — the way a privacy, security, or procurement reviewer needs to see it. If you assess vendors or systems for a living, start here.
What it is, in one sentence
What it does
- Issues a portable identity the person controls — works with Sign-in-with-Apple / Google, storable in Apple/Google Wallet, NFC-tappable.
- Answers questions without moving the data. A buyer's query goes to the vault; only a verdict or an aggregate comes back — never the underlying records.
- Returns value to the person on a consented use — a majority-to-the-individual split.
- Lets the person shut it all off in one act — every standing access right (links, consent grants, partner permissions) revokes together, and every downstream check then fails closed.
- Witnesses records on a public ledger by their hash only — a record's existence and integrity are provable without any content ever touching the chain.
What it never does
The guarantees a reviewer cares about — each one structural, not a policy promise.
The operator cannot decrypt your data
The vault is sealed to the person's keys; we hold ciphertext and hashes, never plaintext. This is our master litmus — every design decision is measured against it.
No cross-system correlation
Identifiers are pairwise; the same person cannot be linked across services, by us or by a partner.
No single point of authority
No one party is the sole verifier of you — verify everywhere, issue nowhere. There is no gate a single actor can close to take your identity.
We never hold your funds
RosaTrust instructs movement between accounts held at a licensed institution; the money-transmitter role sits with that licensed operator, never with us. Custody of money stays with the person or a chartered bank — never the protocol.
Consent grants access, not a copy
A "no" ends use immediately, because nothing ever left the person's custody in the first place.
How the data actually flows
Structured as a privacy / security / technology impact assessment — it doubles as a vendor-assessment starter pack.
| Question an assessor asks | RosaTrust's answer |
|---|---|
| What personal data do you collect / store? | The person's data lives in their vault, encrypted under keys only they derive. As the operator we store ciphertext + content hashes — no plaintext, no readable profile. |
| Who can read it? | Only the person (and whoever they grant a scoped, revocable consent to — and even then only as a verdict / aggregate, not the records). |
| How is consent captured and withdrawn? | A cryptographically signed, scoped, time-boxed grant the person's root issues; revocation is a signed act that makes every consumer fail closed. |
| Data retention / deletion? | The person holds the data; "delete" is theirs to exercise. Consent expiry and revocation are enforced, not advisory. |
| Sub-processors / third parties? | A partner operates only inside its own namespace, gated by the person's consent; it cannot reach another partner's data or the person's other shelves. |
| Cross-border / correlation risk? | Pairwise identifiers prevent linkage; roots-only anchoring means no content crosses any boundary. |
| Integrity / tamper evidence? | Records are hash-anchored to a public ledger through a custody-controlled quorum (no single signer); anyone can verify a record wasn't altered. |
| Security assurance? | Three rounds of adversarial self-audit; cryptographic core held under attack; fail-closed throughout; a public conformance-vector suite anyone can run. Honest gap: not yet a live wire-level pentest. |
Where the storytelling fits
The Trust Society pages use metaphor deliberately — to make the stakes memorable: why extraction is the problem, why sovereignty is the alternative. This page is the plain counterpart: the mechanism. Both are true. A reader who wants the practical substance should reach it in one click, without translating the metaphors first — which is exactly the improvement this page exists to make.
Grounded in the working system — deeper detail in the security posture card, the wallet + consent readiness record, and the Ten Commandments (the same principles, stated as testable guarantees). This page is the mechanism; those are the receipts.
RosaTrust in plain terms — the practical companion to the Trust Society.
The working stack is live today — Rosalind (sovereign health) · Abakus and its Foundation (sovereign banking) · RosaTrust (the trust engine underneath it all).
Owned by no one · anyone can verify it · no lock-in, ever.