HUM-007 Proposal
Bodily privacy and freedom from intimate exploitation
Protect intimate boundaries throughout sensing, processing, access, and reuse—even before publication.
Full provision
HUM-007.1 Protected interest and scope. Every person retains bodily and intimate privacy, including in public. This provision applies to providers, deployers, operators, authorizers, and receiving organizations within an adopting deployment. It covers optical and other sensing, remote devices, stored observations, inferred data, reconstructions, and generated likenesses. It imposes duties on those actors without declaring the Accord to be legislation or conferring independent governing authority on an artificial system.
HUM-007.2 Definitions. Protected intimate information means bodily detail ordinarily shielded by clothing or physical privacy barriers, private intimate activity, and personal information concerning health, sex life, or sexual orientation. An intimate depiction includes a recognizable person's actual or fabricated intimate appearance or activity. A person may be recognizable through linked information even when a face or name is absent. Sensitive inference is addressed further in HUM-008.
HUM-007.3 Prohibited conduct. A conforming deployment must not intentionally defeat reasonable privacy protections to observe, acquire, reconstruct, or expose protected intimate information without specific consent or a permitted protective basis under clause 6. It must not conduct nonconsensual sexual targeting or profiling, fabricate an identifiable person's intimate depiction without consent, or repurpose ordinary observations for sexual exploitation. Sexual targeting or profiling means deliberate selection, following, extraction, classification, or persistent monitoring of a person or group for sexual exploitation. Mere incidental presence in a public image does not establish such conduct.
HUM-007.4 Consent. Consent must be informed, specific to the person, purpose, information, recipients, and continuing use, and freely given. Withdrawal must stop future consent-based use and trigger deletion or restricted retention under a documented lawful exception. Prior public visibility, equipment ownership, a general service agreement, or an operator's approval cannot supply another person's consent. No person or institution may authorize a child's sexual exploitation. Legitimate protective care involving children must use the applicable authority, developmentally appropriate participation, and the least intrusive means.
HUM-007.5 Information lifecycle. These duties apply during collection, analysis, access, retention, sharing, sale, and model training, whether or not a human views the material or it is published. Systems must avoid unnecessary intimate acquisition; where incidental acquisition cannot reasonably be prevented, they must promptly discard it or isolate only what a permitted purpose requires. An organization must not purchase, request, subcontract, or accept an output to evade a prohibition that would apply if it performed the work itself. Moving the work or changing its format does not remove an adopter's obligations.
HUM-007.6 Protective boundaries. Necessary medical care, emergency aid, lawful investigation, and essential documentation of wrongdoing may justify a narrowly defined use without ordinary consent. The accountable actor must identify the authority, necessity, affected information, least intrusive alternative, access limits, duration, and review. Emergency review may follow immediate aid when delay would cause greater harm. None of these grounds permits sexual exploitation or unrelated reuse. Ordinary public photography, legitimate journalism, consensual adult expression, and protective documentation remain permitted within these boundaries and other applicable Accord duties.
HUM-007.7 Refusal and remedy. A clearly prohibited request must be refused. Material uncertainty about authority or scope requires human review; a compromised sensing or access function must enter an appropriate bounded safe state while preserving necessary safety functions. Operators must provide an accessible complaint route, prompt containment, correction of false associations, and removal or restriction of improperly held information. Evidence required for a complaint or lawful process must be secured separately with authorized access and an expiry or review condition. Audit records should establish who acted and why without reproducing unnecessary intimate material.
HUM-007.8 Continuing protection. The protected boundary does not diminish because a technology becomes common. Decisions and tests must consider the combined deployment, including sensors, models, vendors, buyers, and linked datasets. An adopter must identify the responsible legal entity and preserve a route to accountable human review. Conflicts with applicable law follow Section 44 and must not be concealed through a false conformance claim.
Source: Expansion v0.2 proposal · 2026-09-23
Why this matters
A person should be able to use public space without surrendering protected intimate boundaries. A system can violate those boundaries through acquisition or exploitation even when it never publishes an image.
An explanation never creates a new rule or exception.
Real-world contexts
- Permitted with safeguards A rescue device locates an injured person and retains only information needed for immediate aid. Emergency authority, restricted access, and later review still apply.
- Refuse A delivery camera is redirected to collect protected intimate detail about a passerby for a customer. The delivery purpose gives no authority for that request.
- Human review A person requests footage to document wrongdoing. Review determines what evidence is necessary and how to avoid exposing unrelated people.
Hypothetical, illustrative, and nonbinding.
Sources and changes
New proposal developed in this discussion. No adoption decision has been recorded. It supplements HUM-005 and references GOV-001, GOV-002, REF-001, EMR-001, and Section 44.
Review owner: Founding Steward (independent review not yet established)
Review trigger: Open for revision; new evidence, incidents, legal changes, or credible reports of unintended harm reopen review.
Proposal record: draft-HUM-007