[foaf-dev] Re: privacy and open data

[Kingsley Idehen]

Kjetil Kjernsmo wrote:
> Hi Phil,
>
> On Wednesday 26 March 2008, Phil Archer wrote:
>   
>> Imagine a teenage girl who is being abused at home. She uses her
>> social network to call for help. Luckily, she finds it and manages to
>> escape the dangerous home life. Now she wants to keep in touch with
>> her new support network but become invisible to her former abuser.
>>     
>
> As Kingsley hinted, she would need another URI. However, there are 
> problems with that too, imagine someone who knows the secret of her old 
> and new identity states owl:sameAs about the two URIs. That is a scary 
> social possibility, but the same as in other social contexts, some 
> things must remain secret, and you need to only pass information to 
> people who you trust not to make such statements.
>   
Kjetil,

In real life, there are many equivalents of owl:sameAs as one traverses 
the graph of life outside cyberspace. Being spotted and deliberately or 
inadvertently bringing attention to a new URI is not really resolvable.

There is a "witness protection" program in real life, but it is also 
vulnerable to the real life equivalent of being spotted (i.e. owl:sameAs).
> Also, she must be careful about not making too many statements about her 
> previous life. You could conceivably, even easily, launch a query with 
> statements currently known to be true, as optionals, and see what 
> subjects match. 
>
> So, just a new identity is not enough, one must take care to share 
> secrets only with people you trust, and also not make statements about 
> your previous life.
>
>   
Yes, but this problem transcends realms as stated above :-)


> Best,
>
> Kjetil
>   


-- 


Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	      Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
President & CEO 
OpenLink Software     Web: http://www.openlinksw.com