Raw blog points to an interesting proposal about bringing the Web of Trust to FOAF.
The idea is that you would be able to segment the information found in your FOAF file so that you would only be making certain things available. From there, it is up to your friends as to whether or not they make similar information public. If they do, then someone will be that much closer to getting access to my privileged information.
This introducer key sits in a secured portion of my friend's profile. The simplest approach is for my friend to include it directly in with his secured profile such that if he's willing to release the information he considers non-public to someone, then he's also released a third of the information necessary to get my profile key and email address. In effect, if 3 out of 5 of my friends are willing to share their semi-private information (e.g., email address) to someone, they can then also get my email address.
One problem I see in this is that you are saying your information is much more important than the same information from your friends. Your email address is private but you'll be more than happy to give it out if three of your friend's don't value that same privacy. That seems a bit odd to me.
Along those same lines, if everyone keeps information private, then there won't be any way to gain access to it. But these are very good things to think about especially as more people start to make FOAF-type information available in machine-readable form.
Posted by Josh at September 30, 2003 12:50 AM | TrackBack