What are
the Gevulot Protocols?
Programmable communication & presence settings for personal information, based on social, temporal, and place context dimensions.
Privacy is binary: on or off.
Gevulot is multidimensional:
Visibility & Accessibility can be adjusted anytime for others (individuals or groups ) along two dimensions each:
- Opacity (how much is revealed) & Intimacy (what is revealed)
- Interactability (communication preferences) & Persistence (validity duration)
These settings are opaque, cryptographically encoded and in-force in realtime over a distributed global database. Contacts are given a one-time key to your Gevulot.
Why Protocols?
In society: the accepted or established code of procedure or behavior in a given group, organization, or situation.
In computing: a set of rules governing the exchange or transmission of data between actors.
Why “Gevulot”?
In 2012, Hannu Rajaniemi’s science fiction novel “The Quantum Thief” was published. In the novel, Rajaniemi demonstrated a concept—amongst a number of fabulous others—he termed “gevulot.”
How fansites define Gevulot
“Gevulot (Hebrew—גבולות—for “boundaries”, or “limits” ) is a privacy protocol […]. It is a system that allows people […] to set the desired level of privacy in every social encounter, to share memories [via access to something like the Internet]. People can obscure themselves from being seen by others […].”
“Gevulot is a form of privacy […]. It involved complex cryptography and the exchange of public and private keys, to ensure that individuals only shared that information or sensory data that they wished to. […]”