web3privacy/Web3privacynowplatform/Scoringmodel.md

# Privacy scoring modelling research

**Approach**

| Phase  | Description |
| ------------- | ------------- |
| **Expert take**  | Outreach privacy experts behind core privacy services - aggregate their professional opinions on how to analyze if a service is truly private or not.) |
| **Scoring model prototyping**  | Create an open & flexible scoring model for a communal feedback loop - share with the privacy community, evaluate. |
| **Scoring model MVP release**  | Deliver balanced model for privacy services assessment - powered by pros & general public opinions. |

![alt text](https://github.com/Msiusko/web3privacy/blob/main/Web3privacynowplatform/Staticobjects/Screenshot%202023-02-04%20at%2017.03.45.png?raw=true)

## On-going community research (survey) within the privacy experts. 
I asked experts behind privacy-services or contributors to the privacy-centric communities to share their visions on how to analyse if a service is private or not. Answers were collected via chats & survey [form](https://forms.gle/ETBEZed9LUUtLWT87)

**Criterias**:
- min 50 different experts
- broad range of positions: tech, ops, marketing, devrel, strategy
- broad range of services: from privacy coins to mixnets
- different geographies: from the USA to Russia

# Questions from the privacy experts

# Take 1
- does it has untracebility ? (ie addresses is hidden from public ledger)
- does it has unlinkability? (ie transactions can't be linked between each other)
- does amount of transfer is hidden? 
- does IP address of participants hidden? 
- is it decentralized and based on opensource technology ? 

# Take 2

| Question  | Observation |
| ------------- | ------------- |
| much the users in control of their data disclosure?  | (Scale 1-10) |
| how well commnity feedback and evaluation is built into product dev? | the less -» the more centralised it is -» the smaller the % of it staying private without the collectiv intelligence. this is like the web3privacynow  - platform part actually, for sales but also i found this really relevant. |
| is there a community bug / security bounty program / platform?  | yes, no |
| how much transparent disclosure is avaliable on the tech and company | ike smart contract audits, security audits,source of financing?   |
| how private the tech stack it uses on all layers. from hardware to l3/l4 etc.  | how well it is disclosed what they built on and where they host stuff, or if the tech is decentralised like nym - is there avaialbe dashboard data about this? |
| product roadmap and release flexibiity - this is harder one, and I'm not sure it makes sense. what i mean is its also important to have a clear vision but at the same time to react to current needs / bugs / fixing vulnerabilities.  | maybe its redundant with no2 and no2b |

# Take 3
1. What are the trust assumptions the user has by using the platform?
2. What and how is user information stored and transmitted?
3. How much PII is it stored/collected?
4. How is information collected + processed + disseminated
5. How completely you can participate with total privacy?

# Take 4

| Direction  | Observation |
| ------------- | ------------- |
| network privacy  | how do you connect to the chain? can you do it via Tor? |
| blockchain privacy  | do the resulting on chain transactions offer the user any on chain obfuscation? |
| censorship resistance  | how resistant is the project to external pressure. will the project censor you? |
| permission  | do I need to create an account to access the thing or is the thing open access? |
| custody of funds  | at any point is the user out of control of their own keys? |

# Categorisation

## Contents
- [General](#General)
- [Docs](#Docs)
- [Third-party analisys](#Third-party-analisys)
- [VCs](#VCs)
- [Team](#Team)
- [Privacy policy](#Privacy-policy)
- [Token](#Token)
- [Infrastructure](#Infrastructure)
- [Storage](#Storage)
- [Data aggregation](#Data-aggregation)
- [Traction](#Traction)
- [Governance](#Governance)
- [Privacy execution](#Privacy-execution)
- [Product-centric](#Product-centric)
- [Testing](#Testing)
- [Other](#Other)

# General
- Immutability 
- Decentralised throughout, including hosting
- Permissionless & accessible to all
- Open source
 
# Docs
- read the documentation
- Good and comprehensive documentation

# Third-party analisys
- ask about its weaknesses from competitors
- Number of peer reviewed articles at conferences and journals of team members
- Where's the code, has it been audited
- Validation by trusted and respected independent scientists and researchers

# VCs
- Who are the VCs
- not funded by big US VCs like a16z

# Team
- ideological team
- Reputation of team
- is it purely marketing oriented or it seems created by researcher/developers, are the developers anons?

# Privacy policy
- Privacy Policy content
- Non-vague, and non-intrusive privacy policy
- #privacy protection policies

# Token
- is there a token since the beginning ?
- if token since beginning, weird

# Infrastructure
- How much to run a node. 
- Where are the nodes
- Number of nodes/servers/ -> the larger the footprint the best privacy

# Storage
- e2e encrypted LOCAL storage
- What user information is stored? (username, IP address, last connectino, wallets associate, etc)
- Where is it stored? (centralized server, certain jurisdictions, on chain, in browser/local cache)

# Data aggregation
- no email or tel nr for signup
- control over personal data
- does not implement kyc or aml
- Metadata privacy / Minimal to no metadata capture

# Traction
- Amount of transactions 
- number of people using it
- is it famous
- Time of test and battletested code - (e.g. how BSC had passed the stress time of withdrawals with FTX drama or crypto schemes such as ECDSA with more than 2-3 decades alive) 
- Latency
- Cost

# Governance
- DAO structure (if applied)

# Privacy execution
- How is it being transmited? (encrypted, unencrypted, offuscated, etc)
- Confidentiality of transactions
- ability to hide transactional data from the public
- strong encryption algorithms
- If the speed in connection is too fast most probably there no privacy there and rather a direct channel between user - app
- p2p / no central server
- Reliant on one encryption method or multiple
- Combined those encryption methods effectively (holistic solution)
- Trustless - No ID required (this is where ZK's are useful)
- Usage of ZK

# Product-centric
- Onboarding steps
- Usability - for end users or in the developer experience if it is a B2B project.

# Testing
- Ability to run part of the service and verify for myself
- try to trace a transaction
- There is a way to verify the code I think is running, really is running e.g. attestation service
- Other tooling to verify e.g. block explorers 

# Other
- Entropy (non-trivial to estimate, different measurements for type of service) some examples: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.04259 or https://blog.nymtech.net/an-empirical-study-of-privacy-scalability-and-latency-of-nym-mixnet-ff05320fb62d
- Censorship-resistant (how hard it's for a powerful party to block/censor a given service)
- Precise description of the concrete privacy properties. Privacy is complicated so if they don't say exactly what they protect, then its likely vapor
- Doesn’t sell your data
- protects against global passive adversary
- strong secure anonymity tech
- Credibly neutral
- ISO/IEC 29190:2015: https://www.iso.org/standard/45269.html
- Anonymity Assessment – A Universal Tool for Measuring Anonymity of Data Sets Under the GDPR with a Special Focus on Smart Robotics: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3971139

# My personal notes on privacy-scoring (they were made made before communal survey)
_Sketches what could be put inside privacy-solutions scoring model_ (note: think of these as questions to experts for workshop on scoring ideation).

**Open-source transparency**
- **GitHub repos**: # of commits, # stars, date of repo creation.

**Third party validation**
- **Security audits**: yes, no; type of audit; ammount of audits.

**Community validation**
- Existing bugs
- White hackers assesment (like Secret Network TEE bug)
- Negative Discord, Twitter, other public feedback (product & founder-centric)

**Team**
- Market validation
- GitHub contribution
- Track record (incl. red flag projects)

**Financials**
- Investments
- TVL (like Aztec's L2)
- Donation-based
- Public treasury

**Liveliness**
- How active is GitHub activity 
- How active is community
- Is there a public product traction?

**Product-readiness**
- State of product-readiness
- MVP-readiness
- Protocol (test-net/main-net)
- dApp (release timing, third party validation like AppStore/Play Store)
- network-reliability (the state of privacy in Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche etc)

**Cross-checked data leakage**
- Complementing privacy stack data leakage (example: phone + dApp; wallet + RPC etc)
- Third party data leakage (from the hackers to state agents (think of Iran or North Korea govs))

**Data aggregation policies**

_Reference_: https://tosdr.org 

**Centralisation level (incl KYC)**

Reference: https://kycnot.me/about#scores