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Open research · Privacy engineering · metrics · distributed protocols

Can you measure usefulness without watching people?

A private-agent company cannot honestly use conventional behavioral telemetry as its north-star instrument. The open problem is to estimate useful daily agents while treating the operator as an adversary and making individual behavior structurally difficult to observe.

Read the companion essayAll open problems
Problem statement

The hard question.

Estimate useful-agent reach from receipt-derived, edge-local sketches with calibrated noise and secure aggregation, without reconstructing a person’s behavior or a trajectory over time.

The usual growth dashboard measures the part of a product that phones home. A local-first agent needs a metric that does not punish the architecture for respecting its own boundary.

Status

What is true today.

This is explicitly an open research problem and a proposed construction. It is not an implemented analytics system.

Primary source: Counting Without Watching

Constraints

The work is only useful if these survive.

  • Operator, network metadata, and reporting timing are in the threat model.
  • Usefulness is outcome-anchored, not a count of taps or impressions.
  • Privacy composition, bias, battery, bytes, and inflation resistance are real costs.
  • Error bars and unsolved failure modes must publish before a KPI does.
Evaluation

How we would know.

Accuracy with published confidence intervals.
A stated privacy budget and year-long composition model.
Battery, bandwidth, bias, and inflation-resistance measurements.
A first contribution

Start with something that can fail.

Implement an auditable toy simulation: receipt predicate → local randomized response → time-decoupled batching → secure sum → population estimate with published error bounds.

Read it plainly, then make it better.

The companion essay is written for a broader technical audience. The repository and developer community are the places to turn a claim into a contribution.

Companion essayJoin Discord

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