Continuum
The protocol
.continue
A new file format for human existence.
What is .continue?
.continue is a portable, user-owned, encrypted file format that holds your complete personal context: health history, career, finances, family, recovery, identity. Every system that touches your life can read it when you grant access, and every system that touches your life can write back to it when you allow.
It is the contract that ends the clipboard era.
Why a file format matters
The internet was not built around platforms. It was built around protocols. HTTP. SMTP. TCP/IP. .pdf. .mp3. .jpg. Standards everyone could read, so you could move information anywhere without permission.
Your personal data has never had that. Companies hold it, sell it, and lose it. You re-enter it every time you switch providers. Continuum changes that by giving you the file, yours, to carry.
How it works
The four steps below describe what the protocol specifies. Steps one and two are running today: the intake tool encrypts a file in your browser right now, and the composer composes a view, seals it under a fresh key and shares it as a link whose key never reaches our server. Steps three and four describe the institutional side, which is designed and not yet built. The security page lists what exists and what does not, and it is updated before anything ships, not after.
You build your .continue
Your file fills in. Health, career, financials, family, goals, history. It is encrypted on your device with a passphrase that is never stored and never sent, which also means that if you lose it, nobody can open the file, including us.
You grant a view
A doctor needs your medical history. You compose a Medical View that carries only the medical fields, expires on a clock you set, and can be ended right away. Anything you choose to leave OUT of a view is declared on its face, with a count, because a clinician who cannot tell a withheld medication from an absent one is being misled by the design. A record you keep in the private area is different: no view mentions it at all, which is what makes that area private, and the app says so plainly at the moment you put a medication or an allergy there.
They read what you allowed
The link opens exactly the fields you shared and nothing else. The key that decrypts it travels in the part of the link after the #, which browsers never send to a server, so we hold the encrypted bytes and cannot read them.
You end it when you want
End a view in one tap and the encrypted bytes are deleted, so the link stops opening for anyone who has it. What ending cannot do is reach backwards: anything the other side already read or saved is outside Continuum and stays with them. Revocation closes the door. It does not empty the room.
Who owns it
You. The intake tool encrypts your file in your own browser and writes it to your device. Continuum has no servers that hold it, so there is no copy of your file here to read, to sell, or to lose. That is not a policy we could change later. It is the consequence of never receiving the file in the first place.
How institutions integrate
Doctors, lenders, employers, schools and courts. Any institution that hands you a clipboard today can read a .continue view instead. That is the model: institutions pay to read what people choose to share, and the person never pays to own their own file.
The economics flip the data industry on its head. Institutions pay for the privilege of reading your file when you grant access. You are the customer, always.
The open protocol promise
.continue will be released as an open specification. Anyone can build a reader. Anyone can build a writer. Anyone can extend the schema with their own domain. The format outlives any company, including ours.
That is the promise. The world's data problem does not get solved by another platform. It gets solved by a protocol that everyone can use.