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What is SELF?

SELF (the Sovereign Ethical Lifestyle Filter) is a hyper-personalised, private and adaptive AI agent and web filter. Our ambition is to create your personal identity module for the internet, built on a Layer-1 blockchain and AI-enabled operating system, filtering the noise of the web into a clear signal while offering hyper-personalised experiences and augmenting your sovereignty, productivity, and quality of life.

What makes SELF different?

Short version:

SELF is different ultimately because, unlike the majority of the tech landscape, you are in control of your data and how it's used.

  • If you use SELF to search for information, it doesn't return content to you that's biased by who has sponsored the key words you've used, unlike the most famous search engines. In contrast, SELF tailors results around what you want to see rather than what the platform has been paid to deliver to you.

  • If you use SELF as an AI assistant, it doesn't feed your personal information into a Large Language Model that's out of your sight and control. In contrast, SELF ensures your information remains yours and any touch points to the web are fully anonymised so your privacy remains intact.

  • If you use SELF as a memory bank, it doesn't aggregate your private data and package it up to sell to the highest bidder, like other platforms. In contrast, with SELF, you are the only person who controls your information, and if you choose for it to be used then it's your decision, nobody else's.

  • If you tell SELF your preferences, it doesn't hide them from you so you can't access or edit them. In contrast, you have direct access and editing control of what your SELF knows about you.

Longer version:

Modern technology tends to sacrifice privacy and user sovereignty in order to monetise user data and control information flow. The data is sold to third parties that use it to promote addictive behaviour, increase consumption, and maintain filter bubbles, which ultimately leads to decreased well-being among users.

SELF (the Sovereign Ethical Lifestyle Filter) is a personal and adaptive AI that streamlines your digital activities, saves you time and enhances productivity. SELF upholds the integrity of your data while fostering transformation and ensuring commercial responsibility and scalability.

Our six commitments at SELF are:

  1. To make decisions that are in accordance with human rights.

  2. To not cause or enable harm whilst upholding those rights.

  3. To enable people to have control and ownership of their own data, and decide how it is used.

  4. To be fully transparent in our practices so that people understand how we operate.

  5. To uphold regulation and legislation in whatever territories we operate.

  6. To not sacrifice any of our responsibilities in pursuing commercial gain.

This approach is unusual in the current technology landscape, however, we believe that the operating systems of the future will evolve in two main directions; either towards more centralised control, or towards decentralised, democratic, user-control.

Humanity is at a crossroads and everyone has a choice:

Should we continue to use centralised systems and contribute to the progression of ‘Big Tech’s’ ambition for power and dominance, where humans are data batteries and our rights are subjective?

Or should we choose operating systems that empower individuals to have ownership and control over their digital experiences and their data?

This will increasingly become a consequential choice as the capabilities of AI evolve and the data that platforms and their partners collect on us increases exponentially. You can read about why this matters in our manifesto (https://self.app/manifesto).