Sebastian Schkudlara
Your Profile Is Either Public or Hidden. Why?
Every professional platform gives you a binary choice. Either your profile is public — and anyone with a LinkedIn Recruiter license can see your full work history, your connections, your activity — or you lock it down and become invisible.
There’s no middle ground. No way to say “show my job title and seniority to everyone, but keep my salary and email private unless I approve it.” No graduated access. No nuance.
And honestly? That sucks. Because your career data isn’t a monolith. Some of it should be public — how else would anyone find you? But some of it is genuinely private, and you should have absolute control over who sees it and when.
This is the problem I wanted to solve when designing the privacy model for the Scoutica Protocol.
Three Zones. You Draw the Lines.
Instead of public vs. private, Scoutica uses a three-zone model. You decide what goes in each zone, right inside your rules.yaml:
privacy:
zone_1_public:
- title
- seniority
- primary_domains
- availability
zone_2_paid:
- full_profile
- evidence
- experience_details
zone_3_private:
- email
- phone
- exact_salary
Let me walk through what each zone actually means in practice.
Zone 1 — Public (Free, No Auth Required)
This is your storefront. Any AI agent — or any human — can see this without authenticating. It includes just enough for a rough match:
- Your professional title (“Senior Backend Engineer”)
- Your seniority level (“senior”)
- Your domains (“Cloud Infrastructure”, “API Design”)
- Your availability (“immediately” / “not_looking”)
That’s it. No details about your specific skills, no job history, no salary information, no contact info. Just enough for an agent to decide “is this person potentially relevant for this role?” before investing more resources.
Think of it like a shop window. You can see what kind of store it is, but you don’t get the full catalog until you walk in.
Zone 2 — Verified (Authenticated Access)
This is where the interesting stuff lives. Your full skill breakdown, tools and platforms, certifications, spoken languages, and all your evidence links — GitHub repos, portfolio sites, published articles, certificates.
To access Zone 2, an agent needs to authenticate. On the roadmap, this will also trigger a micropayment (around $0.05) that goes directly to you, the candidate. Not to a platform. To you.
The cost is trivially small for any serious employer — far less than the $10K/year they’d spend on LinkedIn Recruiter. But it creates a meaningful friction barrier against mass scraping and spam. If you have to pay five cents to see each profile, you don’t scan 10,000 candidates hoping to find three matches. You narrow your search first, then pay to verify the ones that look promising.
Zone 3 — Private (Your Explicit Consent Only)
Your email. Your phone number. Your exact salary. This data is never shared without your per-request, explicit approval. Period.
No cold calls. No surprise emails. No recruiter who “found your contact info” somewhere. If someone wants to reach you, their AI agent sends a structured request that you can review and approve — or reject with one click.
Why This Beats Platform Privacy Settings
“Can’t I just configure my LinkedIn privacy settings?”
Sure, technically. But there are some fundamental differences:
You don’t own LinkedIn’s privacy policy. They can change it tomorrow. They have, repeatedly. Features disappear. Default settings get reset. New “partner integrations” suddenly expose data you thought was locked down.
Your Scoutica privacy zones live in a file you own. It’s a YAML file in a Git repo you control. Nobody can change your privacy settings except you. Nobody can “accidentally” expose your Zone 3 data through a platform update. The rules are enforced by the protocol itself — if an agent violates them, it’s non-conformant, and other agents in the network can flag and deprioritize it.
The kill switch is real. Delete your GitHub repo and you disappear from the network. Completely. No “30-day grace period.” No “data retention policy.” No “we keep your data for legitimate business purposes.” You pull the plug, your card is gone, your data vanishes. Try doing that with LinkedIn.
Anti-Bias Isn't a Feature. It's a Constraint.
Here’s something I’m particularly proud of. The Scoutica profile schema deliberately excludes entire categories of personal data:
- No gender field
- No age field
- No ethnicity field
- No nationality field
- No photo field
- No marital status field
- No religion field
These aren’t “optional fields that are hidden by default.” They literally don’t exist in the schema. additionalProperties: false in the JSON Schema means you can’t sneak them in. An AI agent can’t discriminate on data that doesn’t exist.
This isn’t just good practice — it’s a design constraint that makes the protocol compliant with the EU AI Act’s requirements for high-risk recruitment systems: human-in-the-loop, audit trails, explainability, and non-discrimination.
The Micropayment Vision
Right now, you give your professional data to platforms for free. They monetize it. You get nothing.
LinkedIn charges employers $10K/year for Recruiter licenses to search profiles that you filled in. That value you created — your carefully curated work history, your skill endorsements, your connections — generates revenue exclusively for the platform.
The Scoutica roadmap flips this. When an employer’s agent accesses your Zone 2 data, a ~$0.05 micropayment goes directly to your wallet. Small enough that no serious employer would blink. Large enough that, across millions of profile views, it creates a real income stream for candidates and a real cost for mass scraping.
Your data creates value. Shouldn’t some of that value flow back to you?
Take Control in 60 Seconds
# Install the CLI
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/traylinx/scoutica-protocol/main/install.sh | bash
# Generate your card (with privacy zones pre-configured)
scoutica scan ~/my-docs/ --with gemini
# Review and customize your privacy settings
nano rules.yaml
# Publish — your data, your terms
scoutica validate && scoutica publish
After the scan generates your rules.yaml, open it and adjust the privacy zones to your comfort level. Move fields between zones. Lock down what you want locked down. Make public what helps you get found. It’s your call. Every single time.
- 💻 GitHub: github.com/traylinx/scoutica-protocol
- 🌐 Website: scoutica.com
- 📚 Docs: docs.scoutica.com
Your career data is yours. Act like it.