Disclosures were never written for you.
Public companies file thousands of pages of disclosure every year. Sustainability reports. Modern slavery statements. Climate risk filings. Diversity reports. Pay equity disclosures. Sourcing audits. Every one of them is, in principle, a description of what the company is actually doing. None of them is written for the person buying the product. They are written for regulators, investors, and rating agencies, the audiences with procurement-grade tools. The buyer gets the marketing.
Across ten-Ks, proxy statements, sustainability reports, CDP submissions, and modern slavery statements. The disclosures grow with each new regulation. The reader who is meant to use them is rarely the customer.
The disclosure ecosystem is among the most expensive in the world. Tens of billions per year in preparation costs across the largest economies. The output is read by the people who set rules. Not the people who pay bills.
Watch what reaches the buyer: a sustainability commitment on a website, a recycled logo, a press release about a pledge for 2030. Watch what reaches the analyst: line-item emissions, audited supplier lists, regulatory restatements, scope-by-scope methodology disclosures. Same company. Two different conversations. One is a brand asset. The other is a procurement document.
The result is asymmetry by design. The buyer is left to trust the marketing. The analyst is given the means to verify. Buyers have not asked for less marketing. They have asked for the same tools.
Of consumers say they distrust companies’ environmental and social claims. The distrust is rational. The claims are written by the marketing team. The verification is held by the analyst team. The buyer is asked to take the claim on faith.
The information needed to replace faith with verification already exists, in the disclosures already filed. Buyers have lacked the tool to read them. Until now.
More than a trillion dollars in penalties across roughly 700,000 cases since 2000, logged by the nonprofit Good Jobs First in a public database called Violation Tracker. Bribery, price-fixing, wage theft, pollution, safety, consumer fraud. Fortune and Global 500 companies account for 81% of the total.
The people who keep the database describe it as an index of recidivism. The same firms appear again and again, because the fines were never large enough to change the behaviour. The record exists. The buyer was simply never handed the search box.
Searches Violation Tracker, the free public database from Good Jobs First, and opens the results in a new tab. Searching and viewing are free. Coverage is strongest for the United States, with companion databases for the UK and more than 75 other countries. goodjobsfirst.org
A free tool that processes the actual disclosures, the audited filings, the scope-by-scope emissions, the supplier lists, against the terms the buyer wrote. The analyst’s view, but for the customer. The verification gap closes. Trust stops being a marketing exercise. It becomes a procurement standard.
Trust is not earned by a brochure. It is earned by a record.
Reading the filings is the defensive half of trust. This is the other half. The same data about you can be arranged two ways. Today, the parties you trust least sit closest to it. Reverse it, and access radiates by trust, with you at the center and the dial in your hand.
The most complete picture of you sits with parties you never chose. You, and the doctor who could actually use it, are pushed to the edge.
You hold the most complete picture. Access radiates outward by trust: fiduciaries closest, brokers shut out. You grant each ring, and you can revoke it.
Data sensitivity should track trust and benefit to you, not extraction power. Information stays in the context it was shared for: your sleep data reaches your trainer, never the ad network. The inner rings, your doctor, your advisor, your own agent, are fiduciaries, bound to act in your interest, so what they know cannot be turned against you.
Shared this way, data stops being something taken from you and becomes something you invest, in your own health, longevity, and wellbeing, with the people bound to serve it.
And this is not a separate idea. What you share, with whom, and for what is itself one of your buyer-side terms. The tiers of trust are simply the data dimension of the terms you already write.
Drawing on Jack Balkin’s concept of information fiduciaries and Helen Nissenbaum’s contextual integrity.