Shelley Powers has been writing about FOAF this week, privacy issues in particular. Ben Hammersley has been having similar thoughts. This is all good. As I understand it one of the aims of FOAF and related vocabularies (FOAF has no ‘built-in’ notion of trust) is to help explore these kind of issues.
Control over what other people and applications know about you is an important issue, and is one of the reasons why I want to become King of Data Province. I may not be able to do much about data that is already out in the wild — innumerable web sites and archives have information about me already. And there isn’t a great deal I could do about it, well, unless we can get an enforceable Data Protection Act for the entire web (which I doubt). But I can at least be the authoritative source of information. Assuming the infrastructure supports it of course. Edd Dumbill has already shown how to sign and encrypt FOAF files using PGP.
FOAF and Privacy
Published
Lost Boy 