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Disclosure Spectrum as Discrete Tiers or Continuous Range

The Question

IFP-12 defines six disclosure tiers arranged in a hierarchy from narrow to broad sharing:

public → professional → professional-open → community-trust → personal → close

This raises three related questions:

1. Discrete or continuous? Is information sharing naturally tiered, or is it a continuous spectrum that these six labels artificially discretize?
2. Why these six? The specific tier names embed assumptions about how relationships are categorized — professional/personal, community/individual. Do these categories transfer across cultures and contexts?
3. Why six? Five might be sufficient (drop professional-open or community-trust). Seven might be needed (add a tier for family or legal obligations). What determines the right granularity?

What Makes This Worth Investigating

Disclosure behavior in practice is contextual, not categorical. A person might share their health status with a professional colleague (outside the “personal” tier) when the context demands it. Rigid tiers may not accommodate context-dependent sharing.

The tier names are culturally specific. “Professional” and “personal” map to a work/life boundary that not all cultures draw in the same place. “Community-trust” assumes a community concept that may not apply to all relationship structures.

IFP-12’s own persona model suggests fluidity. Personas emerge organically from observation (not enumeration), but disclosure tiers are enumerated upfront. There is a tension between emergent personas and prescribed tiers.

The minimum viable architecture question. Are six named tiers a load-bearing decision (the protocol needs stable names for interoperability) or a tactical choice (the names and number could change without reshaping the protocol)?

Possible Directions

• The six tiers may be correct — they provide enough granularity for agent interoperability without overwhelming users
• A continuous score (0-100) with named ranges might be more flexible
• Tiers could be user-defined rather than protocol-defined — the protocol specifies the mechanism, not the vocabulary
• Different domains may need different tier vocabularies — healthcare disclosure differs from social disclosure

Sources

• IFP-12: Personas and Disclosure Tiers, Section 3.3
• [[Allen (2024) Progressive Trust]] — progressive disclosure as a continuous model

Relations

• relates_to::[[Disclosure Tier Hierarchy for Persona-Peer Relationships]]
  • The model this inquiry questions.
• relates_to::[[Granularity of Progressive Authentication Stages]]
  • The same discrete-vs-continuous question applies to authentication levels.
• relates_to::[[Personas Emerge from Observation Not Enumeration]]
  • Emergent personas paired with prescribed tiers creates a tension worth examining.
• relates_to::[[Convergence and Divergence Across Agent Application Platforms]]
  • Different platforms may need different disclosure vocabularies.
• relates_to::[[Vocabulary Lifecycle Through Tending]]
  • Disclosure tier names are vocabulary that needs tending — weeding ambiguous names, seeding precise ones.

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