Settlement Reliance for Data-Derived Advertising Revenue (v1.0)

The Settlement Papers: Paper I

1. Purpose

This standard defines the conditions under which a specific stream of advertising-derived revenue may be relied upon by downstream systems for settlement, audit, insurance, financing, or counterparty trust.

The standard operates at the settlement layer and produces a binary legitimacy determination.

2. Scope

Included revenue streams are those directly or indirectly derived from behavioral data, interaction data, profile data, inferred attributes, or attention, engagement, or targeting signals, where such data influences pricing, allocation, targeting, optimization, or delivery of advertising.

Excluded are contextual advertising with no persistence, profiling, or inference, and revenue derived solely from user-initiated transactions, non-personal content licensing, or infrastructure services without personal data dependency.

Scope is declared per revenue stream, not per entity.

3. Authority

Legitimacy requires explicit authority for the use of personal digital information.

Authority must be prior to use, person-specific, purpose-bounded, revocable without penalty, non-coercive, and non-inferential.

Silence, presence, service use, or lack of opt-out does not constitute authority.

4. Disclosure

For a revenue stream to clear legitimacy, the following must be disclosed prior to settlement reliance: what personal digital information is used; how the information is obtained; the specific revenue-generating purpose; duration of persistence; whether information is shared, inferred upon, or recombined; and the effect of refusal on the person.

Disclosures must be intelligible to an ordinary person.

Bundled, opaque, conditional, or post-hoc disclosures do not satisfy this requirement.

5. Compensation

Where a revenue stream depends on personal digital information, legitimacy requires value return to the originating person.

Compensation must be direct, proportional to use, traceable to the revenue stream, and independent of platform discretion.

Access, features, services, or non-monetary benefits do not satisfy this requirement.

6. Refusal Survivability

Legitimacy fails if ordinary refusal by non-participants creates financial disadvantage, signals suspicion or non-compliance, reduces service quality below a reasonable baseline, requires effort beyond silence, or produces cumulative exclusion at scale.

Refusal must be mechanically survivable and socially neutral.

7. Verification

Clearing requires an attestation that authority claims are accurate, disclosures are complete, compensation logic is applied as stated, refusal produces no penalty, and no undeclared data ingress exists.

Material misstatement invalidates legitimacy.

8. Determination

Each examined revenue stream receives one of two determinations: CLEARS — Legitimacy Established, or DOES NOT CLEAR — Legitimacy Not Established.

No partial determinations are issued.

9. Effect of Non-Clearance

Revenue streams that do not clear may continue to operate.

They may not be relied upon for settlement, audit assurance, insurance underwriting, financing representations, or counterparty risk transfer.

Non-clearance is absence of standing.

10. Versioning

This standard is versioned and prospective.