On 21 Dec 2006, at 10:10, Ciaran McNulty wrote:
Inherent in the Microformats movement is the desire to make
information easier to publish and aggregate, but people need to
consider carefully what parts they want to make available about
themselves and their relationships to others.
In my day job, I keep seeing places where an hCard would be useful
where organisations are publishing contact information, but far from
wanting to make it easily parsable they seem to put all their efforts
into trying to obfuscate it to avoid getting more spam!
With this issue, it makes no difference whether you publish
microformats or not. Phone numbers and email addresses (even postal
addresses) are all parsable without microformats — with sufficient
effort and regular expression complexity.
Spammers will go to that effort; it's their business to gleen
information to abuse. I'm sure they'd be delighted to find hCards to
parse and make their lives a little easier, but I don't see that it
gives them any information that they wouldn't have got otherwise,
through other means.
As always, the only way to keep information private on the internet
is not to publish it in the first place.
Ben
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