Disclosure Conditions

Proof of Clean Hands keeps a person’s identity private by default and discloses it only under rules the person commits to in advance. Those rules are the disclosure conditions. This page explains what is encrypted, who can decrypt it, and what governs that decision.

What is encrypted

When a person generates a Proof of Clean Hands, their name and date of birth are encrypted to the Human Network as part of proof generation. The government document, the biometric scan, and the rest of the personal data are never uploaded in the clear; they stay on the person’s device and are only ever proven about, not shared.

The encrypted name and date of birth are held as ciphertext. They are not stored in plaintext by human.tech, and they are not written to a blockchain in the clear. Disclosure means running a governed decryption, not reading a stored copy.

The conditions contract

During proof generation the person signs, with the ephemeral key used to encrypt the data, the address of a smart contract. That contract is the disclosure conditions: it determines who is allowed to decrypt the ciphertext. Because the person binds their ciphertext to a specific contract at encryption time, the rules are fixed in advance and cannot be swapped afterward.

Who can decrypt, and under what rules

Decryption requires two independent grants:

The ciphertext. The party must obtain the person’s ciphertext from the observer that holds it.
On-chain permission. That party must be granted decryption rights by the conditions contract bound to the ciphertext.

Neither grant is enough on its own. A party with the ciphertext but no on-chain permission cannot read it, and a party with permission but no ciphertext has nothing to read. Because the permission is an on-chain rule the person committed to, disclosure is rule-based and pre-committed rather than left to any operator’s discretion after the fact.

Not a master key

Disclosure conditions do not give any party a standing key to a person’s identity. The data is encrypted to the Human Network, where key shares are distributed so that no single node ever holds the full key; producing a decryption requires cooperation across the network, not a single operator flipping a switch. Separately, the conditions contract governs who is even allowed to request a decryption. Today that permitted set is small and permissioned, and each request is metered and rate-limited. The direction of the system is to broaden it, decentralize it further, and support richer condition types, such as a registered court order, so that the rules can be both stricter and more transparent over time.

This is a strong guarantee against ordinary operators and attackers. It is not a claim of invulnerability against a nation-state adversary, and key management and rotation are auditable by design.

What this gives a person

Their identity is private by default. Nothing is disclosed unless the committed conditions are met.
The rules are fixed at the moment they prove, not negotiated later.
Disclosure, when it happens, is accountable: it runs through an on-chain rule, not a private arrangement.