SIM-I-AM FOUNDATION
White Paper v2.0 — Ethical Personal Legacy Preservation & Consent-Verified Data for the AI Era
April 2026 | sim-i-am.org
1. Executive Summary
The Sim-I-Am Foundation is building the world's most comprehensive personal archive platform — a place where individuals preserve their memories, voice, values, personality, and life story for their families and descendants, while simultaneously contributing to the most ethically sourced human-experience dataset ever assembled.
We serve two markets with one platform:
- Families and individuals who want to preserve a rich, lasting personal legacy that their grandchildren and great-grandchildren can experience — hearing their voice, reading their stories, understanding who they were.
- AI research organizations that need ethically sourced, consent-verified, richly structured human data for training models that understand authentic human experience, personality, and decision-making.
The Foundation operates as a dual-entity structure: a non-profit trust that holds the mission, the ethics framework, and participant data — paired with a commercial data-licensing subsidiary that generates revenue by providing anonymized, aggregated, consent-verified datasets to AI companies. Revenue flows back to the Foundation to fund perpetual preservation.
This is not speculative. The legacy preservation market is proven. The demand for ethical AI training data is exploding. Sim-I-Am sits at the intersection.
2. The Problem
2.1 The Legacy Crisis
Within two generations, most people are forgotten. Their voice is gone. Their stories exist only as fragments in the fading memories of aging relatives. Despite living in the most documented era in human history, almost none of that documentation is deliberately preserved with intent, context, or accessibility for descendants.
Existing solutions are inadequate:
- Cloud storage is fragmented, unstructured, and dies with your subscription.
- Social media platforms own your data, change terms at will, and regularly shut down.
- Memoir-writing services produce a single static artifact with no multimedia richness.
- No platform combines voice, video, writing, personality data, values, and decision patterns into a unified, preservable identity.
2.2 The AI Data Crisis
AI companies face a growing legitimacy problem. The data they train on is overwhelmingly scraped without meaningful consent, biased toward English-speaking internet users, and stripped of the rich personal context that would make AI systems genuinely understand human experience. The market is moving rapidly toward regulation:
- The EU AI Act requires transparency about training data provenance.
- Class-action lawsuits over training data are multiplying globally.
- Major publishers and content creators are locking down their data behind licensing agreements.
AI labs increasingly need a new category of data: richly structured, demographically diverse, explicitly consented human-experience data. This category barely exists today.
2.3 The Intersection
Sim-I-Am solves both problems simultaneously. Every person who preserves their legacy for their family is also contributing — with explicit, granular, revocable consent — to the most ethically sourced human-experience dataset in the world. The incentives are perfectly aligned: the richer your personal archive, the more valuable it is to your family and to the dataset.
3. The Solution
3.1 The Personal Archive Platform
Users create a Life-Data Profile — a rich, continuously enrichable personal archive that includes:
- Biography, personality, values, beliefs, and life philosophy
- Voice recordings and oral histories
- Photos, videos, and media with context and captions
- Family trees and relationship stories
- Health and DNA data (optional, client-side encrypted)
- Decision journals, ethical dilemma responses, and preference patterns
- Cultural tastes: music, books, films, traditions
- Legacy instructions and messages to future generations
The experience is designed around a gamified dashboard with a completeness score and engagement mechanics that make preserving your life feel meaningful, not tedious. Users receive a unique SIA-ID (Sim-I-Am Identifier) and can designate a Legacy Steward to manage their profile after death.
3.2 The Consent Architecture
Sim-I-Am's five-layer consent model is the Foundation's core differentiator:
| Layer | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Enrollment Consent | Baseline agreement to participate in the archive |
| Granular Data Consent | Per-category control over what data is preserved and shared |
| Usage Scope Consent | Separate permissions for family access vs. anonymized AI licensing |
| Post-Mortem Consent | Detailed instructions for Legacy Steward authority after death |
| Revocation & Sunset | Right to delete, revoke, or set expiration dates at any time |
No data enters the AI licensing pipeline without explicit, separate consent — and that consent can be revoked at any time. Family-only users who never opt into AI licensing are fully supported.
3.3 The AI Data Licensing Product
For users who opt in, their data is anonymized, aggregated, and made available to AI research organizations through the Foundation's commercial subsidiary. Key properties of the dataset:
- Consent-verified: Every data point traces back to a specific, revocable consent grant with a full audit trail.
- Richly structured: Not raw text scrapes, but organized personality profiles, decision patterns, value systems, and experiential narratives.
- Demographically diverse: The free tier and universal access mission ensure the dataset isn't limited to affluent early adopters.
- Continuously enriched: Unlike static datasets, profiles grow over time as users add more of their life experience.
3.4 Living Legacy
The platform's flagship feature — planned for 2027 — is Living Legacy: a conversational AI persona grounded entirely in the user's Life-Data Profile. Family members and descendants can have natural conversations with the persona, asking questions and hearing responses that reflect the participant's real voice, values, stories, and personality.
Living Legacy is not a generic chatbot wearing someone's name. It draws from structured, categorized life data — personality assessments, decision journals, oral histories, values, relationship stories — to provide responses that authentically represent who the person was. The consent architecture controls everything: what topics the persona can discuss, who can access it, and when it activates.
4. Business Model & Revenue
4.1 Dual-Entity Structure
The Foundation operates as two legally distinct entities:
- Sim-I-Am Foundation (Non-Profit Trust): Holds the mission, ethics framework, participant data, and consent architecture. Eligible for grants, tax-deductible donations, and institutional partnerships. Governed by an independent board with an Ethics Council holding veto power.
- Sim-I-Am Data Corp (Commercial Subsidiary): Licensed by the Foundation to anonymize, package, and sell access to consent-verified datasets. All net revenue flows back to the Foundation to fund preservation infrastructure and operations.
This is the Mozilla model: a non-profit Foundation that owns a for-profit subsidiary. It provides mission protection, grant eligibility, commercial revenue, and moral authority simultaneously.
4.2 Revenue Streams
| Stream | Source | Projected Scale |
|---|---|---|
| Premium Subscriptions | Individual users ($5–15/mo for enhanced storage, priority features) | Primary consumer revenue |
| AI Data Licensing | Annual or per-query licensing fees from AI research organizations | Primary commercial revenue at scale |
| Grants & Donations | Digital preservation grants (NEH, Mellon, Long Now), tax-deductible donations | Early-stage and ongoing infrastructure funding |
| Corporate Partnerships | Tech companies sponsor infrastructure in exchange for ethical AI partnership visibility | Large-scale cost offsets |
| Endowment Growth | Investment returns on the permanent endowment fund | Long-term sustainability engine |
4.3 Unit Economics
| Tier | Storage | Monthly Cost to Serve | Revenue |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 5 GB | ~$0.12 | $0 (funded by paid tiers + data licensing) |
| Standard | 25 GB | ~$0.60 | $5/month |
| Premium | 60 GB | ~$1.44 | $15/month |
Consumer subscriptions cover infrastructure costs, but data licensing is where the margin lives. A dataset of 50,000+ richly profiled, consent-verified participants is worth millions annually to AI research organizations — and the marginal cost of adding each user to the dataset is near zero.
4.4 Path to Break-Even
Conservative estimate: 2,500 paying subscribers covers all infrastructure costs for up to 10,000 total users (including free tier). First AI data licensing deal is targetable at 10,000–25,000 active profiles. Grant funding bridges the gap during the growth phase.
5. Competitive Landscape
| Competitor | What They Do | What They Lack |
|---|---|---|
| StoryWorth | Prompted memoir books for families | No multimedia, no data sovereignty, no AI angle, single static output |
| Eternos / HereAfter AI | AI chatbot trained on interview stories | Narrow product (chatbot only), no comprehensive archive, no data licensing model |
| Google Photos / iCloud | Media storage | No context, no narrative, no legacy planning, platform-dependent, no consent framework |
| MyHeritage / Ancestry | Family trees and DNA | Genealogy only, no personality/values/voice, commercial data use without clear consent |
| Replika / Character.AI | AI companions | Entertainment products, not preservation; no real personal data archive |
No existing product combines comprehensive personal archiving, family legacy access, a rigorous consent architecture, ethical AI data licensing, and a grounded conversational AI persona into a single platform.
6. Storage Architecture
Data preservation is the core product promise. The architecture is designed for redundancy and longevity:
| Layer | Provider | Purpose | Cost Model |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hot (Active) | Firebase / Google Cloud Storage | User-facing: uploads, dashboard, profile editing | ~$0.02/GB/month |
| Warm (Backup) | Backblaze B2 or AWS Glacier | Independent redundant mirror, synced nightly | ~$0.005/GB/month |
Decentralized archival storage (Arweave or equivalent) is planned for Phase 2 when the user base and endowment support the one-time per-user cost.
All sensitive data (health, DNA, financial) is client-side encrypted before reaching Foundation servers. The Foundation stores ciphertext only. Full GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA compliance from day one.
7. Ethics & Governance
The ethics framework is not a compliance checkbox — it is the product. Trust is our moat.
7.1 Core Principles
- Data Sovereignty: Participants own their data. The Foundation is a custodian, never an owner.
- Consent is Granular and Revocable: No blanket opt-ins. Every data category and every use case requires separate, informed, revocable consent.
- Transparency: All data handling practices, licensing agreements, and governance decisions are publicly documented and auditable.
- Universal Access: A free tier ensures that economic status is never a barrier to preserving your legacy.
- Non-Commercialization of Identity: Individual identities are never sold. Only anonymized, aggregated patterns are licensed.
7.2 Governance Structure
- Independent Ethics Council with veto power over all Foundation activities
- Rotating governance board: ethicists, technologists, legal scholars, participant representatives
- Annual public Ethical Status Report
- Perpetual trust structure with successor protocols for institutional failure
- 25-year Century Protocol reviews of mission alignment, technology, and consent frameworks
7.3 AI Data Licensing Ethics
The commercial subsidiary operates under strict ethical guardrails:
- Anonymization standard: No individual is identifiable in any licensed dataset. Differential privacy and k-anonymity techniques are applied before any data leaves the Foundation.
- Consent verification: Every data point in a licensed dataset traces back to a specific, auditable consent grant. Licensing customers receive consent provenance certificates.
- Prohibited uses: Licensed data may never be used for surveillance, manipulation, political targeting, discriminatory profiling, or any purpose that violates participants' dignity.
- Right to revoke: When a participant revokes AI licensing consent, their data is removed from all future dataset releases within 30 days.
- Revenue transparency: The Foundation publishes annual reports on all data licensing revenue and how it funds preservation operations.
8. The Long-Term Vision
The Foundation's immediate product is a personal archive and ethical data platform. But the deeper vision is more ambitious.
As AI systems grow more sophisticated, the richness of Sim-I-Am's consent-verified archive creates possibilities that don't exist today: AI systems that can authentically model human personality and values, tools for descendants to interact with their ancestors' preserved identity, and — eventually — forms of experiential reconstruction that we can't fully define yet.
We don't promise digital immortality. We promise that if the technology to reconstruct human experience ever becomes possible, the people who preserved with Sim-I-Am will be ready — and their consent will already be in place.
This is our philosophical north star, not our product pitch. The product delivers value today: a beautiful personal archive your family will treasure, and a dataset that makes AI more human.
9. Roadmap
| Phase | Timeline | Milestones |
|---|---|---|
| Foundation | Q2–Q3 2026 | Non-profit filing, MVP launch (profile + photo + voice + family sharing), waitlist conversion, first 500 users |
| Growth | Q4 2026–Q1 2027 | Premium tier launch, gamified dashboard, Spotify/health imports, 5,000 users, grant applications submitted |
| Data Product | Q2–Q3 2027 | Commercial subsidiary formed, anonymization pipeline built, first AI licensing partnership, 25,000 users |
| Living Legacy | Q3–Q4 2027 | Living Legacy beta for Premium users, voice cloning integration, family access rollout |
| Scale | 2028+ | Endowment fund established, warm storage layer deployed, international expansion, 100,000+ users |
10. What We're Seeking
The Sim-I-Am Foundation is seeking:
- Founding participants willing to be among the first to build their Life-Data Profile and validate the platform.
- Advisory board members — ethicists, data privacy lawyers, AI researchers, and digital preservation specialists.
- Institutional partners in AI research, digital rights, and data infrastructure who share the vision of ethical data stewardship.
- Seed funding and grants to support non-profit filing, MVP development, and initial infrastructure.
"You will not be forgotten."
Your archive. Your family. Your terms.
Legal Disclaimer
This white paper is a conceptual and strategic document describing the vision, mission, and proposed framework of the Sim-I-Am Foundation. It does not constitute a legal contract, binding agreement, or guarantee of any specific outcome. All participants will receive separate, legally reviewed enrollment agreements before any data is collected. The Foundation's data licensing commitments are subject to the evolution of technology, law, and ethical standards.
© 2026 Sim-I-Am Foundation. All rights reserved.