usrkeyOne thing first: this isn't a vault for secrets. It's the ordinary stuff — the things you'd tell a new coworker on day one. The reason it still deserves real protection isn't that it's dangerous. It's that no platform should get to own it and use it as a leash.
The problem
You go from app to app, model to model, and explain yourself every time. Every AI tool keeps its own memory of you, or none. The understanding you've built with one assistant is held hostage by it.
This is not an accident of immature technology. It is an incentive. The better a vendor's memory of you, the higher your cost of leaving. No platform will build portable context, because every platform's reason to exist is to make their memory of you the reason you stay.
So it has to be built outside all of them, and belong to none of them.
The claim
A passport works because no airline owns it. The key works the same way: infrastructure that every tool can read and no vendor can capture. You write down what you're willing to share. Tools read it with your consent. You can change it, withhold it, or walk away — at any time, for free.
The guarantees
Any implementation calling itself a USRKey must guarantee all five. There are no partial keys.
- You hold the only key.No provider, relay, or host can read your context without you — not by policy, by construction. "We promise not to look" isn't good enough. "We cannot look" is.
- Consent is per-tool and scoped.Each tool sees exactly what you grant and nothing else. A tool that reads your tasks because you granted it your workstyle is a broken key.
- Leaving is free.Full export, in a documented format, in one step, at any time. An implementation that makes exit expensive has become the thing this exists to fight.
- You can read your own ledger.Nothing is stored about you that you cannot open in a text editor. No hidden profiles, no derived scores, no "trust us, it's just embeddings."
- Infrastructure, not gatekeeper.The format is open. Independent implementations are the goal, not a threat. No one — including the authors of this page — may make themselves a mandatory middleman between you and your context.
What this must never become
Prohibitions age better than promises. Any implementation, hosted service, or steward of this idea must never:
- Train on your context. Not opt-out. Never.
- See plaintext server-side. Anything synced or relayed is ciphertext only.
- Silently widen a tool's access. Grants are explicit, visible, revocable.
- Monetize the data itself. Charge for software, hosting, or convenience — never for access to, or insight derived from, a user's context.
- Hold context hostage. No feature, plan, or dispute stands between a user and a complete export.
Why this matters now
Software is becoming agents — things that act for you, not just answer you. An agent acting for you needs to know who it's acting for, and every platform wants to be the one that holds that answer. Whoever holds it, owns the user.
The alternative is boring and old-fashioned: you hold it. A small, readable file. A format no one owns. That's the whole idea, and it only works if it stays neutral — which is exactly why no platform can build it.
Where USRKey sits
USRKey is a product — the human-facing key at usrkey.com — built on an open family: the six-file format (CC0, copy it freely) and the USRCP protocol, whose encrypted vault is the reference implementation for the strictest tier of these guarantees. Format for everyone, protocol for builders, product for humans — this page's rules bind all three.
Questions a skeptic should ask
Who pays for this? The key is free and stays free. If money is ever made, it's on software, hosting, or convenience — the never-list above prohibits monetizing the data itself, permanently.
What stops the steward from becoming the gatekeeper? The format is CC0 — public domain. Anyone can implement it without asking, which makes gatekeeping structurally impossible: the moment a steward misbehaves, users take their files (already on their own disks) to any other implementation.
Why should I trust an anonymous webpage? You shouldn't — that's the point of the header above: a named steward, a public format repo, a public spec, and a change log on this page. Verify, don't trust.
Changes
v1.1 — 2026-07-19 · Added version stamp, named steward, links to the public format and spec repos, the USRCP relationship, and the skeptic's FAQ. Guarantees and never-list unchanged.
v1.0 — 2026-07-05 · First published: five guarantees, the never-list, and why no platform can build this.