WHO SAW IT,
AND WHEN.

Being built

In commerce, whether a message was read is frequently a commercial fact rather than a social one. A price change, a delivery date or a term nobody acknowledged is the beginning of most disputes about what was agreed.

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What to know

Delivered, read and acknowledged are three things

Delivered means it arrived. Read means somebody opened it. Acknowledged means they said they accept what it said — and only the third one settles anything, which is why the first two are a weak substitute for it.

The commercial use is narrow and real

Not surveillance of colleagues. Whether the counterparty saw the notice that the ship date moved, before the shipment moved, is the sort of question a dispute turns on and the sort nobody can answer afterwards.

Consent runs both ways

A receipt tells the sender something about the recipient. Where it is on, both parties should know it is on — a one-sided signal is surveillance regardless of how useful it is.

Status

Designed, not built. Messages are events in the append-only log today, which is where a read event would sit; the receipt itself does not exist.

Where to go next

THE THREAD ATTACHED TO THE DEAL.

Commerce conversations live in email, WhatsApp, SMS and a phone call nobody wrote down, and the record of what was agreed is scattered across all of them.

Read it

A RECORD NOBODY CAN EDIT.

Every meaningful action on GRAJ is written to a log that only ever grows.

Read it

MODERATING CONVERSATIONS.

Where participants can message each other, some of them will be scammed.

Read it