Re: [Social-discuss] Letting go of your data

[Melvin Carvalho]

On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 3:44 PM, Sandra Snan <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi! I just joined the mailing list and I wanted to start out with this
> quote from the archives, it was sent by Melvin Carvalho.
>
> “Letting your data connect to other people's data is a bit about
> letting go in that sense. It is still not about giving to people data
> which they don't have a right to. It is about letting it be connected
> to data from peer sites. It is about letting it be joined to data from
> other applications.
>
> It is about getting excited about connections, rather than nervous.¡

Just for the record, that was an excerpt from the link i posted from
Tim Berners Lee re: the giant global graph.

>
> Strongly disagree.
>
> The appearance that the major proprietary social sites give is that
> you only have to trust people who’re either admins of the site, or
> people who use a specific handle or nick—i.e. claim to be someone. You
> can set “only people that I’ve explicitly added to my friends list can
> look at these photos”, for example. (You’d have to trust that they
> wouldn’t copy them any further, or if they did, you’d have a list of
> names it could be.)
>
> In my opinion that’s a huge advantage. A lot of my friends have worked
> with women’s shelters, and I’ve personally, and many of my friends have,
> had problems with “stalker” types.
>
> If this advantage is something that daisychain users will have to give
> up for technical reasons, so be it[1], but there’s no gain in
> pretending that this isn’t something that a lot of people see as a big
> plus with that kind of systems, or that they haven’t “realized how the
> web works”. Let’s look this point in the eye, and either implement it
> somehow[2] or cede it with regret.

Making connections doesnt mean they are not access controlled, or even
that there is no web or trust.  It just means that you can link from
one social network to another, if you wish to.

Additionally there are cyrpto techniques such as "zero knowledge
proofs" which allow you to participate without giving all your
credentials away.

>
> I do agree that it’s somewhat exciting to live in such a connected age
> that we do and that humans will change and privacy will erode, but I
> don’t have to *like* it and I certainly can try to encourage other
> solutions than just plugging into a big, world-readable Borg.
>
> RMS once said, regarding secrets, in a speech (paraphrasing): “Soap
> opera secrets, like if you have a crush on someone, I can keep, but
> not knowledge that can advance human technology, like printer drivers”
> or something to that extent. Well, social networks is all about the
> “soap opera” life!
>
> Sandra
>
> [1]: Even though that would put us not really much further from just
> setting up a blog, some rss/atom feeds and a foaf blogroll. (Maybe
> we’ll have event/calendar stuff, though. It bugs me that all my friend
> are on Facebook™, and since I’m not, I miss out on stuff.)
>
> [2]: I’m not good at crypto protocols, but something to manage it so
> that you can know which people read what you write, and set levels so
> that you can allow some things to be kept in the ring of trust. As far
> as I understand it, that’s part of the basic plan of GNU Social,
> right?
>
>
>