[rdfweb-dev] Ecademy FOAF

[Bill Kearney]

> I guess the biggest obstacle to this happening is the fact that the
> majority of these sites are commercial in nature and they see their
> commercial value in the information they hold on people and their
> relationships. I wonder whether FOAF will be the catalyst that drives
> these sites to discover the value in the higher orders of the network.
> If the base interconnections are open and freely available, then they
> will have to add value in other ways, perhaps with enhanced searches,
> FOAF management facilities, offline events.

This is why I've been pressing for use of hashed keys and possible pgp/x.509
signed material. It's one thing for a service to "know" about people if they
don't have the e-mail addresses. Being able to provide community-like services
is one thing. Using that data to pimp off the demographic data to marketers so
they can assault me with spam is another matter entirely.

There isn't going to be a way to make it 'airtight', data will always leak. But
if we have a way to allow folks to make critical bits of info "less visible"
then we can get some momentum going.

-Bill Kearney