Human Subjects Research / Constitutional Note 01
The Right
Not To Be
Processed
Consent to preserve is not consent to process.
A system may be permitted to keep a record it is not permitted to use.
The missing instruction
Keep this intact.
Do nothing with it.
Most consent systems can represent some combination of yes, no, expired, withdrawn, and deleted. They rarely represent preservation without interpretive surrender.
That omission forces a false choice: authorize use, or remove the record from custody altogether.
Authorization State Model
Custody and computation are separate grants.
Not collected
- Custody
- No
- Process
- No
Do not acquire it.
Preserve only
- Custody
- Yes
- Process
- No
Keep it intact. Do not use it.
Bounded processing
- Custody
- Scoped
- Process
- Named
Use it only in these ways.
Delete or return
- Custody
- Ends
- Process
- Stops
End this custody relationship.
Withdrawal is a transition between states. It is not a synonym for preservation-only custody.
Negative Permission Is Not Null
A blank field says we do not know.
A denial says no.
When both are stored as the same null value, the system cannot faithfully represent participant intent. Refusal needs scope, duration, inheritance, auditability, and enforcement.
Operation-Level Authority
Possession authorizes none of these by itself.
The meaningful unit of consent is not the file. It is the operation performed on the file, by a named party, for a named purpose, within a named period.
Preservation-only custody may permit named integrity operations—receive, hash, encrypt, copy, verify, migrate, return, delete—without creating a general right to inspect or use content.
Execution, Not Interface
The refusal must survive the button.
An interface can display a choice. Governance begins when the system still honors it at execution time.
- 01Record custody authority separately from processing authority.
- 02Express explicit denials instead of treating them as missing values.
- 03Attach permission to source, operation, purpose, actor, and period.
- 04Deny unlisted operations by default.
- 05Enforce the restriction at every human and machine access boundary.
- 06Propagate restrictions to copies, indexes, embeddings, links, and derivatives as specified.
- 07Log allowed, attempted, and blocked operations without exposing protected content.
- 08Preserve the permission state across tool, model, vendor, and custodian changes.
Current Implementation Pattern
Preserved. Registered. Related. Not opened for analysis.
Fieldlight's restricted relational archive already demonstrates the underlying pattern. A source can exist in custody, be registered at the stewardship layer, and be connected to a relationship record while its substantive contents remain outside cross-source analysis and public representation.
The archive can know that a source exists, where it came from, what relationship it belongs to, and what restrictions govern it—without treating possession as permission to compute over its contents.
Constitutional Consequence
Deletion is not the only form of agency.
Sometimes the record must remain while computation stops.
Fieldlight Corpus
Where this right now lives.
Right 20 establishes the baseline protection.
Execution specificationNegative Permission State ModelCustody, denial, operation-level grants, inheritance, and transitions become machine-readable.
Implementation modelHuman Research UtilityThe Participation Grant separates custody from processing.
Ethical precursor / April 2025Memory Ethics ProtocolEcho Control establishes the authority to silence or revoke persistent memory echoes.
Execution precursor / June 2025Consent Gate ProtocolConsent is declared, traced, and distinguished from what the user did not authorize.
Architectural precursorHuman-Owned InfrastructureCustody, human authority, external capability, and public projection remain separate.
Applied precursorFieldlight Archive MethodPreservation can precede interpretation without becoming permission for it.
Preservation surfacesOne Export Is Not An ArchiveSurvival across one or many surfaces creates no automatic authority to process.