[foaf-dev] Re: privacy and open data

[Kjetil Kjernsmo]

On Wednesday 26 March 2008, Kingsley Idehen wrote:
> 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.

I absolutely agree. I think, however, that parallels to real life will 
become embarrassingly clear to people, whereas up to now cyberspace has 
been something rather detached from meatspace.

For example, there was a case here in Norway where a man suspected of 
child abuse over more than two decades was arrested. The press of 
course withheld his name, but gave a lot of other details. A colleague 
of mine figured he'd try to find his name based on this information, 
and it only took 15 minutes. Most do not even consider the possibility 
that such things can be found at all, much less in 15 minutes. 

With SPARQL endpoints, the time needed to find this is reduced to a few 
seconds, and I think this is the core problem that we are facing. It is 
not really that the information is impossible to piece together, nor is 
that the problems don't exist in meatspace, it is that our technology 
is so powerful that the windows that previously was slightly open are 
now blown wide open. 

This might embarrass quite a large number, offend some others and put 
yet a few others at risk, and therefore I think that we now, early on, 
has to find ways to use the power that lies in this technology to 
mitigate these risks. If we don't, I think we'll see that people don't 
really want the power given to them.

Kjetil
-- 
Kjetil Kjernsmo
Programmer / Astrophysicist / Ski-orienteer / Orienteer / Mountaineer
kjetil at kjernsmo.net
Homepage: http://www.kjetil.kjernsmo.net/     OpenPGP KeyID: 6A6A0BBC