The Trustednet is a group of users. We, the current members of the Trustednet, are asking others to join the Trustednet now as a way of creating the market for the services we desire from the Trustednet- Privacy, Security, and Identity. When our membership is of a size that vendors will be attracted to the market, we will accredit Privacy Providers to serve our community upon our terms. This may take months or years according to how interested Internet users are in privacy, security, and identity at no monetary cost. The underlying technologies that will be used by the Privacy Providers already exist is some form or another- the Trustednet redeploys these technologies in a novel way for the benefit of our members.

After the first group of Privacy Providers (PP) are up and running, the membership of the Trustednet is still in charge. As a Trustednet member you have three distinct ways of influencing affairs on the Trustednet. First you can use your marketplace power to choose or change your PP as you desire. Second, you will be a member of a subnet of users who use and help regulate their particular PP. Third, your standing as a member of the Trustednet allows you to participate in the overall administration and regulation of the various entities on the Trustednet.

Think of your Privacy Provider as your always on, free, personal assistant. Your on line life will initally be improved with the benefits of single sign on and pervasive security. Your Trustednet log on will replace all of your user names and passwords. If you log on to the Trustednet regularly, your machine will always have the latest in security. As your PP gets to know you, it will automatically customize your on line experience and make your cyber life as enjoyable as possible.As the Trustednet grows, the nature of the Internet itself will change. There will be two on line worlds- the relative safety and security of the gated community that is the Trustednet and the relative "wild west" of the existing Internet. People who value truth and integrity will migrate to the Trustednet.

A Circle of Trust
The Trustednet creates a “gated community” of virtual connections on the existing Internet. Each user logs on securely with their chosen Privacy Provider from any device anywhere. After logging on, all data traffic is routed through the user’s Privacy Provider. This allows the Privacy Provider to be both a gatekeeper and personal assistant for each and every user. The Privacy Providers also have secure connections with one another so that traffic between Trustednet members does not have to be exposed to the rest of the Internet.
Cooperatively, the users operate an Administrator that regulates the Trustednet. The relationship that Users have to the Administrator is indicated in the diagram by the fact that the user circles are all connected to each other independently of their connectons to their respective Privacy Providers.

Profits and Privacy

The Trustednet has incentives for every party to act in a way that benefits all. The Privacy Providers will gain market share and revenue by providing the most trustworthy identity and other services to their own users. Privacy Providers will know just about everything about their respective users and have the incentive to keep that knowledge as private as possible in order to maintain their user relationships. PPs will not be able to sell user data but will be able to give access to marketers to particular groups of users. If PPs abuse this privilege and inundate their users with lots of irrelevant marketing messages, the users will flee to another PP with better marketing message practices. PPs will likely provide users with insurance against identity or data loss for any reason.

The basic trade off of the Trustednet is that users will trust all of their data and identity to one carefully chosen entity, a PP, who in turn shields the user and keeps their data private to the greatest extent possible. When a user visits sites across the Trustednet and the Internet, the PP provisions just the minimum amount of identity data that is required by the other site. The PP filters all of the data to the user according to the user’s criteria. A user could have realtionships with multiple PPs but the Administrator will not allow a single person to have multiple presences at a potentially conflicting event., for instance, a user cannot have several identities sitting at the same virtual poker table.

Durable Reputations

The Trustednet works because of durable reputations. The Trustednet is a network of people, not machines, and each person has one lifetime reputation. Users of the Trustednet must provide real world evidence that they are who they claim to be in order to have all of the privileges of membership. On line registrations will be backed up by evidence as will be required by the Administrator and the various PPs. Users may use their real identity, various psuedo-identities, or maintain anonymity on the Trustednet, but all of their actions on the Trustednet will be transparent to their chosen PP, and PP’s may choose to disassociate with individuals if the individual is harming the reputation of the PP. This is a shift from the current Internet practice of total anonymity, which can cause much mischief, to the idea of accredited anonymity- users are still anonymous to everyone except one entity of their own choosing.

Knowing their reputations are durable will change the way people act on line. People will have strong incentives to build a strong reputation in a global way. Many sites may limit their acesss to real identities only, in order to limit the overheated and personal attacks that many otherwise civil discussions evolve into. Other sites, probably most shopping sites, will have no problem at all selling to anonymous buyers, as long as their anonymity is accredited and they therefore know the shopper’s PP is accountable.

The Administrator

The Administrator of the Trustednet will be the governing body and will be owned and controlled by the Users. It will “tax” the revenues of the PPs in order to fund its activities and possibly pay dividends to it’s owners, the Users. In order to incentivize the growth of the Trustednet, early members may receive ownership benefits beyond that which will be given to later members.

The Administrator will be a virtual entity, running in the computing cloud provided by member Privacy Providers. All meetings and other business of the Admiistrator will be conducted on line and in the open. Board members or other officials of the Administrator will be elected by the membership in regular on line elections. The intention is to have the Administrator become a valuable entity in its own right, with some ownership rights appreciating in value over time while other ownership rights will perpetually remain widely distributed and therefore may never appreciate significantly