[foaf-dev] Re: privacy and open data

[Kingsley Idehen]

Karl Dubost wrote:
>
> Le 26 mars 2008 à 22:53, Kingsley Idehen a écrit :
>>
>> 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.
>> She assumes a new Identity via a new URI in here new Social Space.
>>> In short, any privacy control needs to support changing circumstances.
>> One URI dies and another is born :-)
>
> Not that simple. This is a very binary statement and our social life 
> is not binary. The flaw of the Web with regards to privacy is the 
> structure change.
>
> # Information Opacity
>
> In our social structures,  information:
>   * takes time to travel
>   * is replicated with errors
>
> In some contexts, people will consider this to be bad. In fact, it is 
> necessary in many others. Phil Archer gave an example which is good 
> because, it relies on opacity. Changing URI will not solve the issue.
My point is that this issue is not unique to the Semantic Web. It's an 
attribute of Metaspace / Real Life outside cyberspace.

> As soon as someone connects the dots (old-new uri sameAs), suddenly 
> the whole system is aware of it (information travels faster on the 
> Web) and the replication is identical (no errors).
>
> Our social structures need information opacity. We need to be able to 
> lie, we need to be able to evolve in time and not necessary have a 
> record accessible. My perimeter of knowledge in the past was limited 
> to my close environment and by the transmission of voice messages 
> given face to face. Then the phone came and helped to accelerate this, 
> and now with the web it's becoming even shorter.

The problem is that in the "Attention Economy" or "Popularityverse" only 
one side makes it out via opaque information containers (pages or human 
mouth to mouth mongering).

Yes, but lies affect other people :-)  For every action  there is an 
equal and opposite reaction.

Karma is making it's way to cyberspace, I guess. This is universal law, 
playing out via universal scale. The Web is just a smaller scale variant 
of the universe. Ditto our highways, and metabolic systems at the cell 
level. We have URIs and graphs at all levels.

Discourse isn't bad.

There are two sides to every story.

We live in an inherent duality (this dimension).
>
> Someone can take your photos, put it on flickr, someone else can 
> identify you on this photo, and people can comment and say things 
> which were known only in one community, time, context. There is very 
> little way for an individual to say to the system, erase me. There is 
> very little way for an individual to remove yourself from the Web. 
> Even if you decide to not publish something, people will put you in 
> the system. That is very bad.

The era of the "Real Time Individual" and Real Time Enterprise" is 
neigh, for better of for worse :-) People we have more notification 
aware solutions that leverage de-referencable URIs.


We want to discover discourse intentionally or serendipitously, the 
Semantic Web facilitates this by being grounded in de-referencable URIs.
>
> For addressbook information and the initial question of Henry, I would 
> say any personal information should not be moved from one system to 
> another without the consent of the person.
> Example: All my addressbook is on my computer, there is around 600 
> hundred persons into it. I will *never* put it in an online 
> addressbook like plaxo, yahoo mail, etc. because I don't have the 
> right to do so. People don't necessary want to be indexed in database 
> of private companies.
Of course they shouldn't.  But that has nothing to do with FOAF or 
Semantic Web shortcomings. It has everything to do with ill conceived 
solutions. Especially those that just slap on FOAF without understanding 
what this implies.
>
> As an individual I have no way to inform the Web that I don't want to 
> be in this Acme Inc. database. I have no way to say to someone, I 
> don't want my mail to go to a Google Mail address (sometimes by 
> forward proxy.)
I think you would have to ask Acme how they acquired your data, 
unfortunately. Again, this has nothing to do with FOAF per se, it's all 
about application behavior. How do organizations perform credit ratings 
today? Have explicity authorized anyone to share your financial data? 
Even worse, you're only becoming aware of the data possessed by Credit 
Rating agencies. All of this has been in place pre Web. If anything, the 
Web let's us all fight back by making people accountable for their actions.



Kingsley
>
> I don't have choices.
>
> -- 
> Karl Dubost - W3C
> http://www.w3.org/QA/
> Be Strict To Be Cool
>
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>


-- 


Regards,

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