The Open Context Layer For Data Sovereignty & AI Personalization
By Alev • Aug 19, 2025
Your digital life is broken: fragmented, not secure, and controlled by others. AI assistants don’t really know you; they guess based on scraps of data trapped inside siloed platforms. Does this fractured reality mean there is no escape from shallow personalization and zero authority over your own personal information? Not really.
The internet is on the brink of a radical shift that puts data sovereignty and true AI personalization back where they belong: in YOUR hands.
AI assistants and autonomous agents are moving from niche tools to the primary way we interact with the digital world. They schedule our meetings, help us write, filter information, and increasingly, make decisions on our behalf. This is the dawn of the Agentic Web, where agents act as intermediaries between us and the vast ecosystem of apps, platforms, and services.
But there’s a gap. For these agents to truly serve us, they need context: a persistent understanding of who we are, what we value, and what we want to achieve. Without it, even the smartest systems deliver generic results. Today, that context is either trapped or scattered across platforms owned by providers and invisible to us. This is the buzz killer and cause for the shallow personalization.
The Problem With Today’s Personalization
Modern AI personalizes content and interactions primarily through inference, by guessing what we like based on clicks, views, or brief interactions e.g. current chat thread. But inferred preferences are not the same as explicit intent. They miss the nuance of tone, long-term goals, and deeper personal values.
Fragmentation makes this worse. Our preferences and histories live in dozens of apps, forcing us to re-enter the same information over and over. This “fragmentation tax” wastes time and erodes continuity, while reinforcing platform lock-in.
And because most personalization systems are built on aggregated behavioral data, they tend to flatten diversity. Unique perspectives get lost as models optimize for the average user. The result is an internet that delivers familiar patterns but rarely reflects the richness of individual identity.
To fix this, personalization needs a new foundation where context is explicit, portable, and under user control, supporting data sovereignty and personal data privacy.
Open Context Layer (OCL) & Personalization
The Open Context Layer (OCL) is that foundation. It’s a user-owned, portable, permissioned, and privacy-preserving AI layer for context. It can let you break free from the fractured ecosystems trapping your data and contexts. You can store your preferences, history, and specialized knowledge in a secure vault that only you can control. You decide who can access it, for how long, and for what purpose.
This changes the personalization equation in three key ways:
- Portability: Your context moves with you across agents, apps, and ecosystems, enabling true decentralized data storage.
- Permission: Sharing is scoped and revocable, with full transparency.
- Privacy: Context is encrypted, correlation-resistant, and stored outside proprietary silos, meeting standards for GDPR compliant AI.
Unlike earlier ideas like Solid or static data wallets, OCL is purpose-built for AI and agent interoperability, supporting vector embeddings, RAG-ready indexes, standardized SDKs, and context injection through the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
How Does Open Context Layer (OCL) Work?
Tired of AI forgetting who you are and what you want?
— Plurality Network (@PluralityWeb3) August 8, 2025
We were, too. So we built OCL: private, portable memory you carry to any app, agent, or LLM.
Open Context Layer (OCL) = your context, always with you.
Built with @litprotocol & @oasisnetwork
Link in comments 👇 pic.twitter.com/BYbfeKXOSF
With OCL, you can create multiple context vaults for different domains of your life: e.g., one for work projects, one for health, and another for creative pursuits. These vaults are shared selectively, ensuring apps and agents get only what they need to operate effectively. By combining the features below, OCL makes context not just portable, but durable, private, and ready for the next generation of context-aware AI:
- Scoped & Revocable Sharing: Share specific contexts for specific purposes. Revoke access instantly when it’s no longer needed.
- Granular Permissions: Access rules live as transparent smart contracts, giving you verifiable logs of who accessed your context and under what conditions.
- Interoperability at the Core: OCL integrates with AI services via SDKs, embedded login, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP), so agents and LLMs can consume your context without reformatting or complex integration work.
Security by Design: Your context is encrypted end-to-end using MPC and TEEs, stored in decentralized data storage vector databases, and protected from correlation across different vaults.
OCL’s Real-World Impact
When OCL moves from concept to practice, it effortlessly reshapes how we engage with technology daily, creating seamless and personalized experiences across all platforms. Putting users in control of their data and context removes friction, enhances privacy, and builds trust, making digital interactions smooth, intuitive, and secure.
- Personal Assistants That Remember
An OCL-powered assistant can remember your tone, preferred tools, ongoing projects, and long-term goals across devices, platforms, and LLM providers, without repetitive setup, advancing AI personalization and productivity.
- Privacy-First Healthcare & Education
A health vault could store your medical history, therapy notes, and wearable data, shared only with approved professionals. In education, a learning vault could track your progress and adapt lessons across different platforms, exemplifying privacy-preserving AI.
- Friction-Free Commerce & Media
No more cold starts. Retailers and streaming services can deliver relevant results instantly based on a profile you choose to share, without collecting unrelated personal data.
- Collective Intelligence:
Teams can pool shared contexts for collaboration while enforcing personal boundaries and blocking manipulative prompts or unauthorized use.
- Content Creators, Freelancers, and Agencies
Freelancers and agencies can set up separate contexts for each client, keeping their communication, data, and knowledge organized. This makes it easier to deliver personalized content and knowledge work customized to every client’s needs.
Why Context Ownership Matters?
Taking control of your digital context changes how power works on the internet. Instead of being locked into a single platform that controls your data, owning your context puts you in charge. This freedom lowers switching costs and eliminates vendor lock-in. You can move between services without losing your preferences or history. This shift is fundamental to true data sovereignty.
Context ownership also encourages diversity in AI. When you own your data, different AI systems can interpret it based on their own values and goals. This prevents a small number of dominant platforms from controlling how your data is used or limiting innovation. It allows niche interests and diverse perspectives to flourish across the digital ecosystem.
Owning your context strengthens personal data privacy. You decide when, where, and how your data is shared. This control supports compliance with privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA. Built-in consent and transparency make user-owned context a natural fit for modern data protection standards. Ultimately, this approach builds trust and keeps your information secure.
Looking Ahead
The Open Context Layer isn’t only about improving personalization: it’s a launchpad for new possibilities. Preference discovery tools could help people better understand themselves. Context cooperatives could pool user data to negotiate better services or influence algorithms. Creators, educators, and artists could license their unique style or expertise as a portable, programmable asset.
We believe the Agentic Web will run on the “context”. The only question is: who will own it?
With the Plurality Network’s Open Context Layer, the answer is clear: you do. And when you own your context, data sovereignty becomes reality, personalization becomes richer, privacy becomes the default, and the internet starts to align with you.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Open Context Layer?
A user-owned, portable, and privacy-first protocol that securely stores your digital context to enable seamless AI personalization and advance data sovereignty.
How does it improve AI personalization?
By storing explicit, user-controlled context that reflects real intent, not just behavior or fragmented data, context-aware AI capabilities are enabled.
How is my privacy protected?
Using encryption, multi-party compute (MPC), decentralized data storage, and smart contracts to ensure secure, revocable access, supporting privacy-preserving AI and GDPR compliant AI standards.
Can I control who accesses my context?
Yes. You set selective, time-limited permissions and can revoke access anytime with full transparency through onchain actions.
How does it support AI interoperability?
Through standard SDKs and protocols, AI agents in the Agentic Web can access your context across platforms using Model Context Protocol (MCP) without complex integration.
What are practical applications?
Personal assistants, privacy-safe health data sharing, tailored learning experiences, and collaborative teamwork enabled by personal data privacy controls.
Why is context ownership and monetization important?
It reduces vendor lock-in, strengthens data sovereignty, and ensures compliance. Owning your context also lets you train your agent with your unique data and monetize that knowledge, opening the door to more diverse and personalized AI experiences.
