It looks like LiveJournal now supports FOAF and has automatically created files for all LJ users. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like the users were asked whether or not they wanted the file to be automatically created.
Since the FOAF files can contain personal information and many of LJ's users are young, that doesn't seem like a good idea. Hopefully, users will be able to opt-out or at least tell which data is public.
[Update]In the comments, danbri has pointed out that the files are created from the HTML profile which has both public and private info. That makes me feel better.
Posted by Josh at February 24, 2004 08:34 AM | TrackBackI believe the LJ FOAF page directly shadows the contents of LJ's HTML profile page, the contents of which are public or private by direct control of users. The FOAF page is, it is true, more directly consumed by machines, but it is only a few lines of Perl for the HTML data to be similarly extracted should someone want it badly.
Posted by: Dan Brickley on February 24, 2004 12:22 PMThanks for the info, Dan! I obviously based my conclusions on another post without looking into how the files were created in the first place. I'll update this post.
Posted by: josh on February 24, 2004 12:27 PMLike Dan said, all of this information is just a machine readable format of information we already provide. We respect the user's privacy in all these cases - information that they've chosen to be private doesn't get displayed.
The only minor case where that isn't true is the mbox_sha1sum, however this field doesn't truly map to anything you can see anywhere else on the web, only in FOAF files and other similarly designed files, so it's not really identifying information.
-- The guy who implemented this
Posted by: Christopher Schmidt on February 24, 2004 01:44 PM