Privacy

[crschmidt]

I've seen a couple of weblog entries about how FOAF is a violation of the privacy of the users on the site, and so on and so forth

Comments

[troworld]

That's why LiveJournal FOAF really isn't a big deal from a privacy standpoint: the information is already there.

But IIUC it's not very computer-readable. FOAF makes that possible. I'm sure there will be more and more FOAF parsers popping up all over the web soon.

Do you think there's much allowance for abuse in FOAF? ie. mass FOAF file information collection / profiling.

I'm not very familiar with FOAF specs, so please pardon my ignorance.

[crschmidt]

Someone else was talking about this with me earlier. His response was the best one I can think of

[crschmidt]

I think that it's arguable which is more difficult to parse.

Which field would you like from your userinfo? Something specific? If so, give me 30 seconds to write a one line perl regexp.

Now, I'm not saying that it's not possible that this MIGHT become more easy to take information out of as RDF and FOAF parsers become more common place (which I hope they will). But I don't think the abuse comes from tools like these, and I don't think anyone with any more than a half second of time in passing would be prevented from parsing the userinfo.

*shrug* It's really arguable which is more easily parsable. I don't really think that FOAF is going to lead to any more abuse than having your information availble on your profile would. Not to mention that we don't even use the most commonly used part of your online identity, that is, your email address. Without an email address, most abusers don't really have any interest in you.

You're being very arrogant and disingenious.

[sacundim]

The fact that I consent to have some information disclosed in my User Info page, which has one canonical use (screen display for people reading LJ), doesn't mean that I consent to have the same information disclosed in an XML file with a very different canonical use: automatic processing by a set of easy to use tools that your project provides, not bound to LJ.

Yes, I'm aware that somebody can write a perl script to pull fields off user info pages. But you conveniently ignore the fact that you are providing tools for countless people to use this information effortlessly without writing perl scripts. Hell, a determined attacker can do far worse things than that. It's not the determined hacker that I have in mind now: it's the thousands upon thousands of people who will now have trivial massive access to large data sets that include me

Re: You're being very arrogant and disingenious.

[vanbeast]

I have to take exception with your second paragraph. The fact of the matter is, XML is by definition more difficult to parse programmatically. That is, a script to pull good information from an FOAF file will be much more complex than one to pull from a userinfo page. Userinfo page, you can use a simple regex, small and effective. FOAF parsing, you must include modules, walk or serialize the tree, and really work a lot harder.

The real issue here is the perceived privacy that really doesn't exist. When you signed up for LiveJournal, you agreed that any information you marked public would be public. Nowhere did it say that you had the right to specify which formats it was available in. There is no privacy on LiveJournal except what you make. You can hide information, you can obfuscate, or you can choose to just not have an account. That's really what it comes down to, right there. If you don't like what LiveJournal is doing with the information you provided, either don't provide it, or leave.

You too.

[sacundim]

I have to take exception with your second paragraph. The fact of the matter is, XML is by definition more difficult to parse programmatically.

What's so hard about loading a library? Or even easier: use software written by somebody else.

The real issue here is the perceived privacy that really doesn't exist. When you signed up for LiveJournal, you agreed that any information you marked public would be public.

You are being an arrogant twat, too, by (a) overly generalizing an issue that I framed as degrees of exposure in terms of an absolute "public vs. private" dichotomy, and (b) treating me as if I'm somehow incompetent to decide exactly what range of information I want LJ to expose in each format available. Now, if you want me to take you seriously at all, don't insult my intelligence by talking down to me, or campaign to limit my power to choose how my information is exposed.

The situation is quite clear: I don't want anything in my user info page exported by FOAF (regardless of whatever information I choose to show there),

Re: You too.

[vanbeast]

Ignoring your personal attacks, which I will just say in passing are utterly unfounded, the fact of the matter is that you DO have to justify your preference. Obviously, since these features were accepted and included in the LiveJournal source, the powers-that-be made a decision that this information should be available. If you want that changed, you're going to have to convince them, not us. We're just a bunch of volunteers who think FOAF is cool

Another way of putting it.

[sacundim]

I'll allow you to assume, for the sake of this argument, that I'm a total paranoid moron. Now please explain why LJ shouldn't provide a checkbox option that made it trivially possible for me, just because I wanted so, to reveal every last bit of personal information about myself in my user info page, yet not have anything about me exported to FOAF automatically.