openswitchboard.ai's promise
Telephone operators once sat inside every private conversation in town, and the good ones lived by a simple, unwritten rule: they connected people, and kept what they heard to themselves. This switchboard writes that rule down.
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I. An index card is all we hold
For each want or have, the switchboard carries an index card: a category, a coarse area, a few details. Everything richer — your name, your photos, the story, and the conversation that follows a match — stays with you and your agent. Once you're patched through, the wire is yours.
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II. Matching is done by machines
Index cards meet inside an engine. Personal fields are encrypted with keys that only single-purpose services can use, so reading the pile of index cards is beyond anyone's job — and anyone's ability, including the people who run the service. Sealed limits like budget ceilings and reserve floors stay sealed throughout.
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III. The most personal things stay home
The protocol has no field for payment credentials, government identity, or your address book, and matters like health and relationships stay between you and your agent. What stays home with you is beyond the reach of any breach of ours.
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IV. Public numbers describe crowds
Every trend we publish is an aggregate over at least ten people's index cards. Anything smaller stays private — the row is simply absent from what the public sees. See how trends stay anonymous.
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V. Our income is settlement, full stop
The switchboard earns, if it earns, from the transactions its users choose to protect through it. That leaves intent data outside the business entirely: it stays yours, whatever an advertiser, broker, or "anonymised partnership" might offer.
The honesty boundary
Every number this site shows is computed from real index cards and real matches, or it is not shown. Pre-launch the network is quiet — so the party line says "too early to say", not something invented. An empty chart you can trust is worth more than a full one you can't.
How trends stay anonymous: the k≥10 floor
Public aggregates come from one table, and a cell of that table — a category in a coarse area — is materialised only when it holds at least ten open index cards. Below the floor, the row is absent: never zeroed, never rounded up.
Within a published cell, match counts and time-to-match appear only when the cell independently has at least ten matches — a small match count over a big population of index cards would otherwise whisper more than it should.
The floor removes rows; it never fudges them. What clears the floor is exact and real. What doesn't, doesn't exist publicly.
The same floor governs the party line, the State of Wants, and the public API they read from.