The Autonym project
Autonym is a general-purpose personal context system. It is designed to let a person keep one record they control, choose what each assistant or service receives, and review anything a service contributes before it is added.
Autonym is developing Open Personal Context, an open profile for personal-context interoperability. The project focuses on typed context, deterministic situational resolution, graded recipient-specific disclosure and verifiable accountability. Open Personal Context is designed to build on standards such as PDPP, OAuth/OIDC and Linked Web Storage rather than recreate them. Autonym will provide a reference implementation, but the specification is intended to stand independently of the company or service.
Read the architecture and the related work it builds on.
References to other standards and projects describe intended technical alignment only and do not imply endorsement or partnership.
Read how Autonym supports international privacy obligations, with jurisdiction notes, local requirements and current implementation limits.
Why we are building it
We think "explain yourself once" is a reasonable thing to want. Existing standards are increasingly good at storing personal data, granting access and moving records between services. Open Personal Context starts where those layers stop: it makes existing personal data usable as controlled, situational context across compatible services. It has to be a standard rather than a product, or it becomes one more silo.
What will be open
The planned licence split is Apache-2.0 for the specification, schema, SDKs, CLI and conformance tools, and AGPL-3.0 for the reference server and person's app. The repositories and working releases will be linked here as they become public.
Autonym is maintained by New Media Solutions Ltd. The aim is a specification that can support independent implementations, with a neutral home considered as the project develops.
Governance
Today the specification is maintained by New Media Solutions Ltd, a UK company. The intent is to move it to a neutral home once there is a second independent implementation. The constraints that make Autonym what it is are written into the specification so that they bind every implementation, including ours: no advertising identifiers, no correlation across recipients, no resale, consent and provenance in the schema.
The draft now allows a person to choose a separate, explicit advertising purpose for selected context. Ordinary personalisation permission does not cover advertising. This does not permit resale, advertising identifiers or a cross-recipient correlation service. Temporary context and reciprocal contribution are also part of the agreed scope. These capabilities are not implemented yet. Read the scope additions.
How the project will be funded
The core hosted service will be free for people after beta, with optional paid extras. Paid features and prices will be published before they become available. We also plan commercial services for organisations that build on Autonym.
The contents of personal records will not be sold. Hosting and tooling are intended to fund the service while leaving people in control of their records.
Contributing
The repositories are not public yet, so there is nowhere to open an issue or a pull request against. Write to hello@autonym.dev in the meantime.
The intended terms are a Developer Certificate of Origin for the specification and the Apache-2.0 packages, and a contributor licence agreement for the server and app. They will be confirmed and published before contributions are accepted. Normative changes will need an issue first. The specification uses semantic versioning, and a named maintainer decides until the neutral home exists.
Where each part stands
| Part | Where it stands |
|---|---|
| Draft specification | Published. Edition 1.0-draft-1 of Open Personal Context is published on this site: the core, the PDPP, MCP and REST bindings, the vocabulary, the conformance manifest with its statement audit and test vectors, an adoption record for every standard it uses and a worked example for media. |
| Disclosure compiler | Implemented as a library. A tested library in the reference repository selects and renders what a recipient may receive under a grant. No service uses it yet: there is no authenticated read or stored grant, and no receipt is issued for a read. |
| Reference implementation | Planned. The server, a sandbox of synthetic records, a demo recipient, a public conformance runner, local mode and a self-host bundle, built in phases with the specification first. None of them is released. Its repository has integration tests of the encrypted record store, signing keys, owner log, first-party sign-in with passkeys and the authorisation server's metadata and token key set, which issues no token yet; none of these has a released route. |
| Interactive demonstration | Browser simulation. A browser-only demonstration with fictional data walks through the watch example: choosing what a recipient receives, checking the exact text, reviewing a proposed event and stopping future access. It is a simulation, not a service. |
Roadmap
Now
Edition 1.0-draft-1 of Open Personal Context is published, with a PDPP binding, an adoption record for every standard it uses and a worked example for media. The schemas, the scope grammar, a disclosure compiler library, a signature verifier library and published test vectors exist, and a browser demonstration uses fictional data. The reference implementation's repository has integration tests of its encrypted record store, signing keys and owner log, of first-party sign-in with passkeys, and of the authorisation server's metadata and token key set; the authorisation server issues no token yet, and none of this is released or reachable at a public route.
Next
The reference implementation continues, specification first: authorisation on PDPP Core, then the read path with signed receipts, with the vocabulary until its approval is recorded.
After that
Testable by a stranger: the same server locally and self-hosted, a sandbox of synthetic records on autonym.me, a demo recipient and a public conformance runner. Then the repositories open for review.
Later
Contribution and purge, moving a record between hosts, importing from assistant exports, and launch readiness before real accounts open. Family features, emergency cards and the recipient registry are reserved for a later version.
Who
Autonym is built by Matt Le Masurier, a UK technologist who has spent his career building video streaming platforms for broadcasters.
The name
An autonym is a name a person gives themselves. Autonym is the name of the project, its reference implementation and the planned hosted service. The standard it implements is Open Personal Context. In the current draft, autonym also appears in every handle, scope and media type. The wordmark is always lowercase.
Contact
hello@autonym.dev ·github.com/autonymproject ·@AutonymProject on X