The Protective Legitimacy Score: How to Tell Whether a Trust Claim Is Structural

Short summary

The Protective Legitimacy Score is a framework for evaluating whether software systems actually deliver on trust claims like 'privacy-first' through structural implementation rather than marketing. It assesses five core properties—local authority, exposure minimization, reversibility, resilience, and coercion resistance—by examining actual system design, not promises. Use it as a forcing function to validate trust claims against real behavior, documentation, and tests.

• •PLS evaluates whether trust language is backed by actual system structure, not marketing claims
• •Checks five properties: local authority, exposure minimization, reversibility, resilience, coercion resistance
• •Use as forcing function: score honestly, document reasoning, re-score after structural changes only

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