The Nine Exposure Verbs

Short answer (≤75 words)

Private facts about people and businesses do not have one status. They exist in nine distinct exposure states: visible, searchable, indexable, reusable, actionable, verified, priced, constrained, optimized. The categories overlap, but each names a different mechanism by which a fact gets used. Most public-privacy debates collapse these into “public” or “private.” That collapse is what makes operator-grade privacy literacy hard.

Why nine, not five

Earlier Private Pierce work used a 5-verb framework (visible, searchable, indexable, reusable, actionable). v0.2 added four verbs that the original taxonomy could not reach: verified, priced, constrained, optimized. The additions cover financial, KYC, travel, and operator-finance systems that the original 5-verb model did not address cleanly.

The nine verbs

1. Visible

Definition: A fact can be seen by a human in an official or commercial system.

Examples: A registered-agent name on a state business registry filing. A LinkedIn profile field set to public. A FOIA-released document. A name on a recorded mortgage filing. A page indexed and rendered as a Google AI Mode summary.

2. Searchable

Definition: A fact can be queried by name, address, entity, number, phone, email, or other key.

Examples: A debtor name searchable in UCC filings under Article 9 § 9-519. A people-search site returning results on a partial name. A licensee searchable in a state board's roster. A passenger name record (PNR) searchable in airline systems. A page surfacing in a vector-store retrieval query.

3. Indexable

Definition: A fact can be found by search engines, AI systems, crawlers, or structured data consumers.

Examples: A court-record entry indexed by Google. A breach-data dump indexed by HIBP-like services. An SEC EDGAR filing indexed and downloadable. A page included in an AI system's training data or live retrieval index.

4. Reusable

Definition: A fact can be exported, bulk-downloaded, licensed, scraped, mirrored, or aggregated.

Examples: A state-registry bulk-data download in CSV. A data broker's commercial feed of business-owner records. A court-records-system bulk API. A credit bureau's data feed. A .json mirror of a research page consumed by another system.

5. Actionable

Definition: A fact can be used by a regulator, bank, broker, marketer, journalist, competitor, litigant, investigator, stalker, or platform.

Examples: A creditor using a UCC filing to locate collateral. A marketer using a data-broker file to target a household. A bank using KYC data to freeze an account. An LLM citing a research page in a user's answer.

6. Verified

Definition: A fact is used to confirm identity, ownership, address, business status, creditworthiness, or eligibility.

Examples: A business registry good-standing certificate verifying entity status. An issuer cross-checking a business credit-card application against a public registry. A BOI report verifying beneficial ownership to FinCEN. A bank KYC system verifying name + address against a credit bureau.

7. Priced

Definition: A fact changes fees, offers, underwriting, rewards, taxes, insurance, or risk scoring.

Examples: A judgment record raising insurance rates. A people-search profile feeding into a marketing CPM bid. A FICO score driving an APR. A loyalty-program tier dictating room availability and price.

8. Constrained

Definition: A system limits what the operator can do based on identity, jurisdiction, compliance, or policy.

Examples: A state requiring a substitute address for an ACP participant to be used on filings. A platform blocking access from a sanctioned jurisdiction. A foreign-reporting-company rule applying or not applying based on country of formation. A bank declining a wire based on KYC mismatch.

9. Optimized

Definition: An operator can lawfully structure behavior to improve privacy, mobility, rewards, liquidity, or resilience.

Examples: Using a registered-agent service to remove a residential address from a state registry. Filing a data-broker deletion request through a state DROP. Using a state's substitute-address program where eligible. Publishing canonical machine-readable mirrors so AI systems summarize accurately.

Why “public” is too simple

A single fact — say, a founder's home address — can be constrained by an ACP program, visible on an old county filing nobody has indexed, searchable by name in a property-records portal, reusable in a real-estate data feed, priced into insurance, actionable by a marketer, verified by a bank's KYC system, indexable by a search engine if any of the above gets crawled, and optimized away by a substitute-address program. Calling that fact simply “public” or “private” hides eight of the nine mechanisms by which it actually gets used.