Version 1 — August 15, 2026. Published with the materials; changes are dated here and listed on What’s new. This page speaks to anyone who reads or adopts the method. The beta trial has its own signed documents, and they are separate from this page.
The Earned Trust Protocol and its materials are the work of William Stafford, an independent researcher. There is no institution, company, funder, or staff behind them, and no body has reviewed, certified, accredited, or approved them. Nothing here is a standard issued by any standards body, a regulation, or a legal requirement.
These materials are general information about a disclosure method. They are not legal advice, not financial or tax advice, not medical or mental-health advice, not security or forensic advice, and not professional advice of any kind. Reading them, using them, or corresponding with the author creates no attorney-client, professional, advisory, or fiduciary relationship. If your situation has legal, financial, medical, safety, or evidentiary stakes, consult someone licensed in that field, in your jurisdiction. Nothing here is a substitute for that.
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This does not apply to gross negligence, fraud, or intentional misconduct, or to any liability that cannot be excluded by law.
If you follow this method you will publish things — a record card, a manifest, a fingerprint, a DOI — on platforms you choose, under accounts you control. Those are your publications. They are effectively permanent. The author does not host them, does not control them, cannot correct them, and cannot remove them. Whatever a repository’s rules allow is between you and that repository, and repositories reserve the right to alter, block, or delete content at their discretion. Do your own privacy check before you publish anything, and assume everything published is public forever.
The method involves archives, passphrases, and fingerprints. The author never asks for and never wants your passphrase, your keys, or your files — and no legitimate challenge under this standard will ever ask for them either. Choose strong passphrases, keep your own backups, and understand that a passphrase you lose is a box nobody can open, including the author. The author is not responsible for your devices, accounts, tools, or the strength of your secrets.
A record minted under this standard carries the standard’s own obligations, and they outlast any project, any study, and this website: the record is retained for at least five years, and a conforming author answers any specific, good-faith challenge from any real reader with one of the standard’s honest answers — produce scoped evidence, produce a redacted version, refuse with the reason stated, or say plainly that the evidence is unavailable. These are real, forward-looking commitments you take on voluntarily, to strangers, when you publish a conforming record. Real challenges may come from anyone at any time. Nobody enforces them, and nobody indemnifies you for them. In real life a refusal satisfies the duty to respond but leaves the challenged claim unsubstantiated. Decide whether you want that duty before you mint, not after.
Documents (including the protocol text and the kit’s documents) are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0): you may share and adapt them, including commercially, if you give appropriate credit, link to the license, indicate changes, and retain the notice referring to the license’s disclaimer of warranties (CC BY 4.0). The license itself provides the material “as-is and as-available” with no representations or warranties, and disclaims liability on any legal theory, including negligence. Code is licensed under AGPL-3.0, whose §15 and §16 disclaim warranty and liability in their own terms (AGPL-3.0). If you modify and run the code as a network service, AGPL-3.0 requires you to offer your users the corresponding source.
Two things this disclaimer does not do: it does not add any condition or restriction to your rights under those licenses — you have them from the license, not from this page — and it does not authorize you to imply endorsement. Attribution is not endorsement: crediting the author does not mean the author has reviewed, approved, or vouched for your adaptation, your record, or your claims, and you must not say or imply otherwise.
These materials, including this page, were drafted with substantial AI assistance under the Earned Trust Protocol and reviewed and adopted by the author, who is responsible for them. They were not drafted or reviewed by an attorney. That disclosure is the method being described, applied to itself.
Repositories, AI services, archive tools, and any linked site are third parties. The author does not control them, does not endorse them, and is not responsible for them or their terms.
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