Data Ownership & Handling

Data Ownership

YOU Protocol places a strong emphasis on user data ownership and flexibility, ensuring a bespoke approach to privacy that caters to individual needs and applications. Within the system, users have the autonomy to decide what information they wish to reveal by selecting specific groups for proof generation. The flexibility doesn't stop there; users can create single proofs or bundle them, depending on the context of their sharing.

Further enhancing the control, YOU Protocol allows users to set fine-grained permissions, limiting the number of times a verifier can authenticate a proof. Such meticulous control empowers users to generate proofs that either remain valid indefinitely or expire after a single verification, adding a strategic layer of security and privacy.

These nuanced options lend themselves to various use cases for both on-chain and off-chain verification methods:

• On-chain Verification: Ideal for one-off activities where an immutable record is needed. Examples include proving attendance at an event, submitting a vote, sending an RSVP to an event, or claiming specific items. This method's inherent security and transparency make it suitable for scenarios that demand a robust and traceable verification process.

• Off-chain Verification: Designed for situations where continuous or periodic verification is necessary but without the need for on-chain recording. This approach is useful for background checks for employment, dating profile validations, public reputation profiles, and other contexts where privacy and flexibility are paramount. The off-chain method provides a more streamlined and cost-effective way to authenticate, fitting seamlessly into everyday verification needs.

Data Handling

Blockchains play a primary role in the You Protocol, providing a trustless and decentralized source of truth and allow functionality such as revocation. Yet not all data is suited to live on-chain, which is why other-data handling mechanisms are introduced that are credential-specific and decided by issuers. Over time, we aim to progressively decentralize and move more components on-chain in order to strengthen censorship-resistance and ownership.

The diagram below shows the location of the data.

Key Component	Off-chain	On-chain
Generation of Identity	Yes
Storing YOU ID	Yes
Generation of Public Identity Commitments	Yes
Storing Public Identity Commitments	Yes
Generation of Proof	Yes
Verification of Proof	Yes	Yes
Creation of Reputation Attributes		Yes
Linking Public Identity Commitments with Providers	Yes