Within the agreed upon policy specifications that result from the negotiation phase of a transaction, one aspect of the transaction that may have significant impact on future interactions is the maintenance and control of information related to the transaction itself. It is the development and control of this information that most affects the privacy of all the parties of any given transaction. Perhaps the most basic such information is the record of participation in the transaction itself, followed closely by the positions taken by the various parties to the transaction.

In many if not most instances, the occurrence of a transaction is indeed a matter of record within the particular policy infrastructure and as such a registration of the transaction is mandated. In particular, if a transaction involves a “consideration offered for consideration received” exchange then a detailed record of the transaction may well be required by all parties to the transaction in order to properly document their tax liability. Within the United States, even pure barter transactions are subject to income tax liability. Consequently, a trusted record of a transaction may well be a requirement that conflicts with privacy claims on the part of the individual participants. Such a record would likely need to include evidence of the authenticated identities of the participants, trusted time, date and location indicators as well as the financial details of the transaction itself. Mechanisms available within public key infrastructures make such records quite plausible, assuming that a computing entity such as the transcendent personal device is available to provide the cryptographic processing and key storage required for these operations.

Part of the trust infrastructure is the treatment of consequences of interactions. This covers as broad a range as do the interactions themselves. The purpose of an effective policy infrastructure is to allow the parties to an interaction to agree beforehand what the consequences will be given the different possible outcomes of the interaction proper. The most generic form of interaction is what we have described as “consideration offered for consideration received.” In general, within such an interaction if the consideration due each party is acceptable, as determined during the conduct of the interaction, then the main purpose of the determination of consequences is to confirm that the agreed upon consideration is actually delivered. As with many other aspects of the transaction, this determination may actually require recursion in its application. For most effective social ecosystems, there is an overriding policy infrastructure that encompasses the conduct of interactions in subordinate policy infrastructures. The most general such infrastructure is that of the law but direr consequences reach into the trust infrastructure.

Conceptualization of a Social Ecosystem

The boundary of a social ecosystem is defined by the extent of the trust infrastructure on which it is based. Different systems may utilize different mechanisms through which trust is established and through which it is conveyed, perhaps ranging from physical constraints and boundaries to logical mechanisms such as those we discussed earlier for computer networks. Consequently, a social ecosystem can be of piece-wise extent with different origins and levels of trust. It may consist of non-contiguous enclaves surrounded by untrustworthy areas. Its protected trust conveyance mechanisms allow the extension of trust through untrustworthy communication channels. Co-existent within the trust infrastructure, but governed by it is the policy infrastructure. Just as the extent of the trust infrastructure may be non-contiguous, so may the policy infrastructure, as it may leave undefined behavioral areas inside the social ecosystem.

Within the trust infrastructure is found the identity registry, an accessible compilation of the identities of the social ecosystem. A central feature of a policy infrastructure is an applicable

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