Re: Should WebIDs denote people or accounts?

Sent from my iPad

> On 18 May 2014, at 7:18 am, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com> wrote:
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>> On 17 May 2014 22:30, Timothy Holborn <timothy.holborn@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Timbl has referred to persona in past.
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> Do you have a pointer to this?
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rww/2014May/0022.html
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>> The notion of multiple accounts is highly important, for security reasons if nothing else.  webID has been interpreted as an identity aggregation strategy IMHO by some.  The spec itself does not mandate that use-case.
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>> (Mind, I've debated the need for other ontological options before)
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>> Sent from my iPad
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>> > On 18 May 2014, at 1:57 am, Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org> wrote:
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>> > Summary: Most people will be unwilling to give up the idea of having multiple separate accounts.  This calls into question the whole idea of WebID.
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>> > First off, as an aside, hello everyone.   I was in the CG for its first few weeks to help get things started, but then left when it looked like things were well in hand, and I had many other W3C duties.   Since then, nearly all of my Working Groups (SPARQL, RDF, GLD, etc) have wrapped up, and I'm mostly doing R&D, working with TimBL and Andrei Sambra.   The work we're doing needs something like WebID.
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>> > That said, I have to raise a difficult issue.   Maybe there's a simple solution I'm just missing, but I fear there is not.
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>> > The examples in the spec, and what I saw from Henry when he first presented foaf+ssl, show the WebID denoting a person.   In the examples, it's often an instance of foaf:Person, and occurs in triples as the subject where the predicate is foaf:name, foaf:knows, etc.  Also in triples as the object of foaf:knows.
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>> > So that means that in RDF, my WebID denotes me.   And if I have three different WebIDs, they all denote me.    Anything that's said in RDF using one of my WebIDs is equally true to say using any of my other WebIDs, and a reasoner might well infer it.   That's how it looks like WebIDs are supposed to work.
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>> > This is in stark contrast to how most online identity systems work. The usually model is that a person has an account with a particular service provider.   In the old days that might have been a bank, while these days it might be some kind of "identity provider" like Google or Facebook.   There is important flexibility in this model.    I have two Google accounts, and my kids have many among themselves, so on the computers around the house, there are many possible Google accounts saved as possible logins.    Behind the scenes, Google may or may not be correctly inferring which humans are attached to each of these accounts, but as long it doesn't get wrong which accounts can see adult content, or use my credit card, or see/edit particular documents, that's okay. Those important features are attached to accounts, not people, in systems today.
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>> > FOAF makes this distinction quite clear, with classes foaf:Person and foaf:OnlineAccount.   FOAF, quite reasonably, puts relationships like foaf:name and foaf:knows on foaf:Person.   It's interesting to know my name and who I know.   It might also be interesting to see which of my accounts are linked with other accounts, I suppose, although that's more complicated.
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>> > I'm not sure exactly why people might have multiple accounts. Sometimes an account is provided by an employer or school and goes along with lots of resources, but also includes restrictions on use or limitations on privacy.  Sometimes an account is obtained with a particular service provider, and then one no longer wants to do business with them. Sometimes security on an account is compromised and a backup is needed.   Sometimes one just wants to separate parts of life, like work-vs-nonwork.   I've asked a few friends if they'd be willing to have exactly one computer account, and gotten an emphatic "No!".
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>> > So the my question might be, can WebID allow that separation?   If access control is granted by WebID (as I've always seen it done), and WebID denotes a person (as I've always seen it), and the computer figures out that multiple WebIDs denote the same person (as it's likely to do eventually), then isn't it likely to grant the same access to me no matter which of my WebIDs I'm using?   Wouldn't that be the technically correct thing for it to do?
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>> > In summary: WebID is doing something quite radical in the identity space by identifying humans instead of accounts.   Are we sure that's a good thing?    It seems like in practice, humans interacting with service providers want to have multiple distinguishable identities with separate authentication.  One might try to clean this up with some kind of role-based access control [1], but that might not solve the issue that by having WebIDs denote people, they prevent people from authenticating differently to get different access/behavior.
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>> > (It's true some identity providers, like Facebook, forbid a human from having multiple accounts.  But I think in response we see humans get their additional accounts by using other providers.)
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>> > The conclusion I'm tentatively coming to is that WebIDs should be 1-1 associated with accounts, not people.  As such, they'll be associated with authentication, authorization, and profiles, as they are now.   But the RDF modelling will have to be different, with things like { <webid1> foaf:knows <webid2> } being disallowed.
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>> > If we're going to make a change like that, making the WebID one hop away from Person, I'd suggest actually making it denote the account's profile page, so that it can be a normal URL, denoting an Information Resource.
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>> >       -- Sandro
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>> > [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role-based_access_control
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