Memory Salvage Without Photographs: Returning "Having Been Witnessed" Through Contextual Matching — A Position Paper: From a Photograph-Free Phase 1 to a Signature-Matching Phase 2
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: This position paper presents "archive for U", a memory-salvage infrastructure founded on a single proposition: the evidence of your life does not live in your own camera roll — it lives in the folders and memories of the others who witnessed you. The paper formalizes five design principles (No Surveillance Architecture; No Monetization of Vulnerability, enforced as a financial constitution with a Harm Ceiling clause; Virtue Is Invisible; The Right to Silence; Disclose Failure) and a staged architecture that begins with Phase 1, a photograph-free, biometrics-free contextual matching design. Phase 1 locates anonymous benefactors and buried creators through asymmetric context pairing: a public layer of circumstance, a withheld verification layer known only to the seeker, and a confirmation layer that only the sought person could know — where confirmation is explicitly defined as recognition-based (the seeker's recollection and conviction), not machine matching, since the system never stores the answer. Abuse by stalking is excluded not by keyword filtering but by grammar design: only the passive, received-benefit form of a question ("I was helped; they did this for me") is admissible. Peripheral witnesses contribute abstracted memory fragments that chain corroboration without identifying anyone. The paper argues that Phase 1 is the same structure as the later signature-matching Phase 2, implemented without biometric data, and serves as the ethical testbed for the entire system.
Author: Ohizumi, Tetsuo
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225449100