L4 actors: public signals only, by design
The strictest governance layer is a choice, not a default — and it is load-bearing.
The Geo-Neural Layer has four layers, and the fourth — Actors, the people — is the one with the strictest governance. L4 carries public signals only. That is not a default setting we forgot to relax; it is a choice, and it is load-bearing for everything the GNL claims to be.
L1 Instruments, L2 Governments, L3 Companies change for characteristic reasons and carry their own versioning rules. L4 Actors — people — is different. A person is not a financial object or a policy regime; a person is a legal subject, and the moment the graph starts carrying private signals about people, it is a different system with different law attached. The GNL refuses to be that system. Public signals only is the line, and everything behind it — the versioning, the manifest, the audit posture — is shaped by that refusal.
Why the strictest layer is the actor layer
Governments and companies are public in a way people are not. A central bank policy is published; a company filing is filed. A person’s private behavior is not public, and a graph that ingests it is a graph under GDPR, under data-subject rights, under a fundamentally different compliance regime. By restricting L4 to public signals, the GNL stays on the side of the law where the law is clearest: what is on the public record is on the graph. The strictest layer is strict because the alternative is a different category of legal exposure, and DEINO is not in that category.
Public signals, versioned
Public does not mean unversioned. An actor’s public record changes — a new appointment, a public statement, a disclosed holding — and each change is a new NodeVersion, hash-linked (BR-842). The actor layer is versioned like the rest of the GNL; the provenance is the same. What is different is what is allowed to be a version: only what is on the public record. The versioning discipline is identical; the ingestion discipline is stricter.
A graph that ingests private signals about people is a graph under a different law. Public signals only is how the GNL refuses to be that graph.
The choice is load-bearing
Load-bearing means the rest of the architecture leans on it. The manifest attests provenance for every layer, and for L4 it attests that the provenance is public. An auditor reading an L4 NodeVersion knows, by construction, that it came from a public source — because the architecture does not have a path for private signals to reach L4. That is not a policy an operator could relax by changing a setting; it is a structural property. The choice is in the design, not in the configuration.
- L4 Actors is public signals only — the strictest governance layer in the GNL, by design.
- Public means the public record: appointments, statements, disclosed holdings. Private behavior does not enter the graph.
- Versioning is identical to the other layers — NodeVersions, hash-linked, BR-842. The intake is stricter; the chain is the same.
- The choice is structural, not configurable — there is no path for private signals to reach L4.
What this costs and what it protects
What it costs is coverage. The graph will not model a person’s private preferences, private communications, or undisclosed positions. For a forecasting platform, that is a real limit — private signals are sometimes the most forecast-relevant ones. What it protects is the entire compliance posture: the GNL stays on the public side of the law, the manifest attests public provenance by construction, and a regulator reading the architecture sees a system that chose its scope honestly. We are pre-revenue, building the POC; L4 is built and inert until calibration fills it, and when it fills, it fills with what is on the record.
The strictest layer is the actor layer because the alternative is a different legal category. Public signals only is not a limitation we apologize for; it is the line that lets the rest of the GNL be defensible.
— GNL governance note