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Every record names its writer

Every Arkiv entity carries two system attributes:
  • $owner: the address that controls the entity. It can change through an ownership transfer.
  • $creator: the address that created it. It never changes.
Both are indexed, so both are queryable by anyone:
Either query returns everything that wallet ever wrote, across every Arkiv app.

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Why that matters

Separate small actions add up:
  • a stock report on a pharmacy app, a question on a mentorship app and a note on a wiki app are one query away from a single activity profile;
  • the list of medicines one wallet keeps reporting can hint at a health condition;
  • the link is permanent: $creator never changes, even if ownership is later transferred.
Who is harmed: end users, whose actions are joined into profiles they never agreed to; and builders, who today choose between “users write with their own wallet” (linkable) and “we write everything from our server wallet” (users lose ownership, and the server becomes a single point of control).

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Expiry is not erasure

Arkiv entities expire, which removes them from queries. It does not remove them from history. We measured this on Tiramisu: after a record expired, getEntity and normal queries no longer returned it, but
  • a query at an earlier block (atBlock) still returned it with its payload, and
  • the payload bytes were readable in the creating transaction’s calldata.
Short lifetimes are therefore not a privacy tool. Content that must stay private has to be encrypted before it is written. See encrypted payloads.

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What a fix has to keep

Hiding records is easy if users give up ownership. The goal is harder:
  1. Unlinkable: nobody can tell which records belong to the same person.
  2. Still owned: each record is owned by a key only its user controls.
  3. Findable: the user can find all their records again, from any device.
  4. Provable: the user can prove one record is theirs when they choose to.
  5. Open: no single company runs the privacy layer.
One-time owners and relayers are how Arkognito meets all five.
Last modified on October 12, 2026