- From: Greg FitzPatrick <gf@medianet.org>
- Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2000 15:00:04 +0100
- To: "Marja-Riitta Koivunen" <marja@w3.org>, "Dan Brickley" <Daniel.Brickley@bristol.ac.uk>, "Guha" <guha@epinions-inc.com>
- Cc: "www-rdf-interest" <www-rdf-interest@w3.org>
Marja wrote: Isn't social security number just that? Maybe in the future they > will use a URI instead of a number. Another thing is then do the users want > to use it because of privacy issues. > This is where I think this leads: People exist They are identified by ... Their names Descriptions of their WHEREabouts Descriptions of their physical features Descriptions of their interactions with society These descriptions are aggregated by Governments Businesses Organizations into collections which are given (relatively) Unique Identification numbers such as.. Social Security Numbers Customer IDs Membership IDs At the same time people are addressable through various mediums such as... Post Telephone Email Doorbells Due to prevailing technical difficulties and other historical circumstances, people's addresses and their various identifiers are tangled up with one another. This tangle is so omnifarious, we hardly seem to notice. Surely it is the destiny of the Internet to disentangle addresses and identities resulting in the following disjunction... Identity A protected by agent X who maintains Address A1, A2.... for communication negotiated by agent Y to Address B1, B2.... maintained by agent Z for the protection and privacy of Identity B or You as represented by a trusted 3rd party agent meeting your legal obligations as a citizen/member of something exposing yourself to law enforcement (contentious) as represented by a trusted 3rd party agent in buying and selling goods and ideas. in transactions notarized by 3rd party agents maintaining tax revenues (by consent (hopefully)) as represented by a trusted 3rd party agent in communicating with family friends strangers interest groups employers doctors & lawyers etc. whereas each possible communicator has varying access to you Admirable as P3P might be, it could also be a diversion from reaching a state of ubiquitous anonymity between all parts external to a 3rd party agent. Examples: As a shopper it is in your advantage to let the seller know as much about yourself as possible. You would be more willing to give this information if you were assured that your identity was never to be divulged and you would be more secure in your privacy knowing that your agent and not the seller was allowed privy to your true identity. Unified addressing means that what ever object of digiphernelia we are using to communicate with someone or something using another object of digiphernelia, there will be one unique address to do so with. It will be the business of trusted 3rd party agents to negotiate the terms, quality, range and type of this communication. Greg >
Received on Tuesday, 7 March 2000 09:00:05 UTC