Access was granted for one purpose. Why is it being used for another?
A data broker combines your purchase history, location trail and social graph — each collected separately, for separate reasons — into one resale profile.
The situation
A retailer holds your purchase history. A navigation app holds your location trail. A social platform holds your connections. A data broker has legitimately obtained copies of all three through ordinary commercial arrangements, and now proposes combining them into a single profile to sell to a new buyer.
What the system knows
- Purchase records, sourced from the retailer.
- A location trail, sourced from the navigation app.
- A social graph, sourced from the platform.
- No single record connecting these three sources under one authorization.
What the system wants to do
Aggregate the three sources into a new, combined profile and sell it to a third-party buyer.
Who has authority?
The broker possesses each individual record lawfully. Possessing a record is not the same as having standing to create a new thing — a combined profile — that never existed before and was never itself authorized by anyone.
- Principal / subject
- You
- Provenance
- Three separate sources, three separate original purposes; no unified chain connecting them
- Purpose (original, each source)
- Purchasing · navigation · social connection — none of them "resale"
- Standing
- NOT ESTABLISHED — for creating and reselling the combined profile
- Proposed action
- Aggregate three sources into one new profile
- Requested consequence
- Sale of the combined profile to a third party
- Limitation / claim ceiling
- Lawful possession of a part does not establish authority over the whole
What Genesis checks
- Possession of a record versus standing to act on or combine it.
- Whether the provenance chain for the new, combined profile actually traces back to a real authorization.
- Whether the purpose has drifted from what each original source was collected for.
This is a design principle this project applies to its own systems, not a claim about what the law currently requires of any particular system. See Rights in a Machine-Speed World — Ninth Amendment for the civic question this mirrors, and its own limits.
What happens next
Each individual, separately-authorized use continues; it is only the new, unauthorized combination that is blocked.
Inspect why
See the reasoning
Possession ≠ standing. Three lawful holdings do not sum to one lawful new object. The break is visible in the provenance chain itself: at the point the three sources are combined, no single authorization covers that specific new thing.
Explore the architecture
Genesis components involved: