Traceability Without Disclosure: Why Movement Data Does Not Constitute Product Intelligibility

Traceability systems answer where a product has been. Disclosure systems structure what a product is. This paper examines the growing institutional reliance on traceability as a proxy for product transparency, documenting the structural gap between movement data and product-level intelligibility. A product can be fully traceable — with custody records, timestamps, and handling events intact — and remain fully opaque at the product-information level. The paper analyses traceability architectures across multiple jurisdictions and argues that traceability records movement while disclosure describes the product. These are different architectures serving different questions, and conflating them obscures a structural gap in product information systems.