The creators of the Respect Network, an ambitious scheme to rewrite the rulebook of online interactions and commerce, launched the service Monday with the promise privacy by design and “marketing nirvana” in one package.

Like the Safe network, Respect is an attempt to create a decentralized successor to today’s ad-centric model, where everyone throws their personal data into centralized services such as Google(s goog) and Facebook(s fb). It’s both a new application platform and a network of private, portable “clouds” of personal data, bound together with a permission-based system that keeps the user in control of her own information.

A user might have a personal cloud hosted on his own home server or that of a participating cloud provider – he can easily move it around if he doesn’t like the hoster’s service. If some social network, for example, wants to access his data, he can permit it do…