[foaf-dev] privacy and open data

[Julian Bond]

Beware here that private data accessible to some people has a tendency 
to leak out and become public data accessible to all. An example of this 
is private RSS feeds being read in online RSS readers and then being 
searchable by all. The RSS community have tried to be good about this 
and not index or make public feeds that are protected by HTTP AUTH but 
it has been known to fail.

When it comes to FOAF, FOAF is designed to be smushed with other bits of 
FOAF. Once you've done that a few times, the original privacy controls 
will tend to be lost.

I've always taken the view that members profile data should have a 
series of controls.
- Hidden from everyone but the site owner
- Visible to logged in members only
- Visible to world+dog but not search engines (but what is a search 
engine? One that isn't banned in .htaccess, and respects noindex, 
nocache, nofollow and robots.txt)
- Visible to world+dog

Ideally some of this is should be set by field as well. The world can 
see my profile but only my contacts can see my phone number.

So if that's the HTML, microformats and FOAF should mirror it. And the 
shortcut is that FOAF only contains data that is visible to the world in 
HTML.

-- 
Julian Bond  E&MSN: julian_bond at voidstar.com  M: +44 (0)77 5907 2173
Webmaster:          http://www.ecademy.com/      T: +44 (0)192 0412 433
Personal WebLog:    http://www.voidstar.com/     skype:julian.bond?chat
                            Glides On Smooth