Protocol — how the world should meet a person

Status: public review draft · the long version is at /protocol/review

In short

For most of your life, you are the integration layer of the world. You explain yourself to the bank, then to the doctor, then to the employer, the school, the insurer, the state — and you carry the pieces between them yourself. Each system builds its own model of you, for its own purpose, and sees only its own part.

Each of those systems can make a good decision inside its own function. Together, the sum of those good decisions can be a bad result for your life — and no system is responsible for the sum, because no system sees it.

Now AI is beginning not only to advise you but to act for you: buy, book, apply, negotiate, move money. On the technology side, the infrastructure is enormous. On your side, a comparable layer is only starting to form.

We are proposing an open protocol for the missing side. We call it a protocol — the way machines on the internet agree how to talk to each other — and not a standard. A standard is something others recognise after testing. This page is our request for that testing.

What already exists

Most of the mechanics for exchanging data and authority with a person have already been built, and they are maturing fast: digital identity and verifiable credentials (the European Digital Identity Wallet, W3C Verifiable Credentials 2.0), consent records and receipts (ISO/IEC TS 27560, FHIR Consent), data that moves only on your request (Estonia's consent service, the EU once-only system), open banking and open finance from the UK and the EU to India, Brazil and Australia, agents acting within signed limits (AP2), human oversight of AI (EU AI Act, Article 14), and — in Estonia, New Zealand and Singapore — public services organised around the events of your life.

We do not propose to replace any of it. We build on it, and we say so.

What is missing

Among the systems we reviewed, we have not found one layer that does three things together for a specific person:

• before an interaction, places an offer from any sector — a loan, a job, a treatment, an agent's task — inside your whole life and shows you what it would do to the rest of it;
• during the interaction, gives the organisation only what its lawful purpose needs, and nothing more;
• after it, keeps the decision connected to your life for as long as it shapes that life, and lets someone check whether the system is still working for your goals — or has started working on you.

This is a finding about the sources we reviewed, not a claim that no one else has tried. If you know prior work we have missed, tell us; that is what this page is for.

The idea, in one picture

YOU
  ↑ decision and control              ↓ intention
A SYSTEM ON YOUR SIDE
  understands your whole life · models consequences over time · assembles the route · protects your interest
  ↕  OPEN PROTOCOL «PERSON ↔ WORLD»
  request · minimum disclosure · consent · delegation · receipt · revocation · result
THE WORLD
  bank · insurer · employer · school · doctor · state · AI agent · business · other people
  ↓ event and result
THE SYSTEM ON YOUR SIDE UPDATES YOUR ROUTE

Two laws hold it together. The system on your side may use more context in order to protect you; the organisation receives less — exactly what its function needs. And: the more the system on your side knows about you, the less reason the outside world has to obtain that knowledge.

The hardest line: a forecast made for you is not a score made for them. The system on your side may tell you whether a loan fits your life and how to close it in seven years instead of twenty. The bank still decides by its own lawful criteria. Through this protocol, it receives only the confirmations you allow for that interaction. Nothing leaves your side as a hidden conclusion that an organisation is asked to trust.

The most important direction is not world → person but person → world. You say «I want a home», and the system gathers the bank, the insurer, the property, the notary, the state, your children's school, your commute and your work around that one intention — each sees only its part; the sum stays with you.

What Life GPS has today

Life GPS is the first environment in which we are testing this architecture on the person's side. What works: the core, a map of your life, a route where each next step explains its reasoning, the avatar, programmes, crisis handling that works offline (Life GPS is not a medical, emergency or crisis service — it points to real help), Russian and English. A network between people is built and not yet open — it launches with the first funding round. The constraints that govern the system were written before the code that implements them and are published. Scoring a person with a number is forbidden by a law of the system. The beta is open.

Not yet: connections to institutions through the protocol — banks, public services, agents. Those open with the next stage. So, to be exact: the product on your side exists and can be tested now; the open protocol is the next step, and the review draft is its first public form.

What we are asking

• If you are a person: open the product. Try it. Tell us where it fails you.
• If you are a researcher or an evaluator: we built a system with unusual constraints. Break it. Tell us how you would tell a change caused by the system from one that would have happened anyway.
• If you work in a bank, an insurer, a regulator, a clinic, a school or a digital government: you already have your rules. Put them next to ours and help us build your sector's scenario on a working system.
• If you build AI agents: what does human oversight mean once the agent acts on its own? Put our human-side layer next to your safety systems.
• If you work in a standards body: we reuse your mechanisms deliberately. Tell us whether the remaining pieces can be specified interoperably with what you maintain.

Read the full public review draft → /protocol/review — the problem, the precedents, the exchange cycle, the sector profiles, the life journeys, what each party keeps and what we do not promise, the principles, and the sources.

Write to hello@lifegpsos.com. If you find an error or prior work we have missed, we will correct the draft and say so.

Every claim on this page carries a status