Hi Tantek,
Tantek Celik wrote:
This is also a classic visible data (eg on HTML pages) vs invisible data (eg at
URLs not linked to or at least not easily viewable in browsers in
random/rare(r) XML formats) probem.
The more visible the data, the less likely users will be surprised by having
data they may have thought was private (because they didn't see it on the web)
be scraped, aggregated, indexed, republished.
When data *is* visible that users don't feel comfortable publishing, they take
steps to remove or make it private.
Hence we discourage publishing of invisible data. It's user unfriendly, and
leads to far more frequent violations of user expectations.
I generally agree. We discourage people from exposing anything in FOAF
that isn't otherwise available in textual form in public HTML. While it
seems (I never got the details confirmed before it was switched off)
that Tribe may have exposed more in the RDF/XML than in the HTML, from
reading through the many user comments it was the wholesale-ness of the
thing that really upset people. It looked like their entire profile
*and* those of their buddies had been copied/cloned. This could have
equally well have been accomplished through use of curl/wget and some
scraping tools, and most users wouldn't have been any the wiser, or any
the happier.
You can make your own mind up here,
http://brainstorm.tribe.net/thread/34fb1a79-351d-4251-8318-829623c1c9cb
The initial post is pretty indicative of the tone,
"Can someone please tell me why my bio and all of my tribe friends are
listed on a site I have never been to or heard of? I didn't think this
was Tribes style. I feel cheated and betrayed. If I wanted my profile to
be farmed out, I would join Facebook."
Short of keeping all public profile data buried inside hard-to-parse
GIFs, any markup describing profiles and linking to buddies is at risk
of being 'exploited' in just this way.
I think the main reason we haven't seen many complaints (about FOAF or
hCard+XFN) is not the visible/invisible issue, but simply that there
aren't many sites who have taken a "download the entire set of people
descriptions and re-assemble them on another site" approach. Thankfully.
cheers,
Dan
--
http://danbri.org/
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