Architecture

Private Spaces, end to end.

Designed so your security and legal teams can answer "is this safe to put our offsite on?" with specifics — not vibes. Here is exactly how it fits together.

The shape of it

Three actors, one rule. Your organization issues certificates. A Geo-managed relay authenticates them and routes the right traffic to the right peers. Members hold their own keys on their own devices. A computational wall keeps your space and the public app from ever seeing each other.

Your organization
Issues + revokes per-member certificates
Managed super-peer
Authenticates · gatekeeps · routes
Members’ devices
Hold keys · gossip events P2P
Hard wall
Public Geo app
Anonymous · aggregate-only · separate namespace

Four primitives, no surprises

Per-member certificates

Each member gets a certificate signed by your organization: alias, role, and an optional verified email. Membership is what the certificate says it is — and you can revoke it at any time. Access ends at the relay, not by trust.

  • Cryptographically signed by your org — not by Geo
  • Revocation propagates to the relay immediately
  • Role-aware — organizers see identity, members see aggregates

The gatekept relay

A managed super-peer that we operate. Its job is small and specific: authenticate every connection against your organization’s certificate authority, and only route your private topics to authorized peers. It is a gatekeeper and a rendezvous — not a content store.

  • Event content lives on member devices, not the relay
  • Connection + access metadata is logged for your audits
  • We operate it; we do not get to see your event payloads

The hard wall

Public topics are addressable by geography alone — anyone can find them. Private topics are addressable only with your organization’s secret. Public clients cannot subscribe to your topics because they have no way to compute the topic key. Identity, arrival, departure, and in-space relationships never merge into the public reputation graph.

  • Cryptographic separation: no shared key, no overlap
  • Enforced by the relay and by the client — defense in depth
  • No silent fallback from private to public, ever

Versioned consent + audit

When a member joins your space, the exact text of the disclosure they accepted is captured against a specific policy version ID. Years later, you can still reproduce the words they agreed to. DSAR requests are answerable by registry ID and timestamp.

  • Per-member consent records, never overwritten in place
  • Exact disclosure text reconstructable for any join event
  • Erasure + export tooling for GDPR / CCPA / LGPD requests

What you control vs. what we operate

YouGeoYour members
Who is invited to the space
Issuing and revoking member certificates
Setting space policies + disclosures
Running the managed super-peer
Keeping the public/private wall enforced
Holding device keys
Storing event content
DSAR + audit tooling

For your security and legal teams

Identity & access

Cryptographic identity per member. No shared accounts, no SSO password to phish. Certificates are revocable in real time; revocation is enforced at the relay.

Data flows & retention

Event content moves directly between authenticated peers. The relay logs connection + access metadata for your audits; retention is configurable. No third-party analytics, no tracking pixels.

Audit & DSAR

Every consent record carries the policy version ID, the disclosure snapshot, and the timestamp. Reproduce any member’s agreement on demand. Export and erasure tooling included.

What Private Spaces are not

Private Spaces are for events that happen in the real world inside your organization. They are not:

  • a chat app — use Slack, Teams, email for messaging
  • a video conferencing replacement
  • anonymous to your organization — you see who you invited
  • retroactive — content created in a private space stays in that space

Ready to put your offsite on Geo?

We’ll walk your security and legal teams through the architecture in detail and provision a sandbox space for evaluation.