Re: [foaf-dev] Re: privacy and open data

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.
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.

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.

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.

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 don't have choices.

--
Karl Dubost - W3C
http://www.w3.org/QA/
Be Strict To Be Cool

Received on Wednesday, 26 March 2008 23:26:32 UTC