The User Section Is A Conformance Test For The Site's Own Claim
Summary
The user area, the one thing that must not be stored in it, and the documented reason its stated objective can backfire. What a visitor assembles — which agents run where, holding which credentials, with which containment — is in aggregate a serviceable plan for attacking them, so the site stores their choices rather than their answers: references into a public library of pre-computed trees, and nothing describing their machine. Browser storage then stops being a compromise and becomes a demonstration of the site's own thesis, checkable in the network panel in ten seconds. And the objective is behaviour change, which has a measured failure mode: strong fear appeals with low-efficacy messages produce the greatest defensive response, so a frightening page with no credible answer performs worse than one that says nothing. That contradicts the explainer's no-remedies rule, and both are right, because a general page may withhold and a personalised one may not. The hardest case is hosted, where the honest answer is that nothing the visitor can do changes the containment — zero efficacy by construction — so its exit is a request rather than a remedy.
Key concepts
- Store the choices, not the answers — the rule, running — and there is no free-text input on the page at all
- A privacy claim that is architectural — a property rather than a promise, because there is no backend to send to
- Zero efficacy by construction — the hosted page alarms most and can do least, so its exit is a request
- Measure action, not alarm — C22 — and the honest admission that a page with no backend can measure none of it
Key ideas
- A general page may withhold the answer; a personalised one may not — withholding creates appetite in one and denial in the other.
- Losing the stored pack costs the visitor almost nothing, which is exactly what a demonstration wants.
- A local-folder copy of the site gets an opaque origin, so this is the feature that breaks first in a downloadable bundle.
- A visitor saying “that is not what my setup looks like” is the cheapest correction the library will ever receive.
On this site
Became document 14 of the registry MVP pack and the workflow at /assess — the first thing on this site that is built rather than specified.