Re: [Social-discuss] Control own privacy, posted by _others_

[Story Henry]

On 6 Apr 2010, at 10:53, Rob Myers wrote:

> On Tue, 06 Apr 2010 00:05:32 -0400, Ian Denhardt <address@hidden>
> wrote:
>> 
>> Here's the problem I see with this: I'm running a gnu social instance on
> 
>> my own server, quite literally a PC sitting under my bed. How do you 
>> justify saying I can't make your name, as it appears on my website, 
>> running on my hardware, a link to anywhere I please? Supposing I don't 
>> have an instance of GNU Social, I just have a website. should I not be 
>> allowed to manually link to various people, who may or may not want me 
>> to do so? It's possible it would be impolite of me, but ultimately 
>> there's a free speech issue there.
>> 
>> I'm not arguing privacy isn't important, but there's a conflict. 
>> Certainly we need access controls so that I can control who can access 
>> what on my profile, But it feels a bit draconian for you to be able to 
>> have access controls that determine what I can post on my website. I 
>> don't think I would run the software at all if it allowed for this, or 
>> since it is free software, I would simply remove the functionality.
> 
> Certainly everyone should control their own computing resources and their
> own running software. This is a free software project. And people will
> simply modify the software to work around any restrictions we might be
> tempted to add.
> 
> But we do need to recognise this conflict and do what we can in the
> software to address it.
> 
> 
> Possible solutions:
> 
> 1. Have "anti-tags" that the software respects by default. Or would that
> end up being a source of hilarity like Outlook message recall emails to
> mailing lists? They would making searching for embarrassments easier than
> simply leaving the original tag unchallenged.
> 
> 2. Allow people to ignore tags from other instances on their instance, and
> to not propagate those tags to other instances.
> 
> 3. Require that tags are confirmed, and simply leave tags unconfirmed on
> the other instance if the tagged user declines to confirm them. This avoids
> the embarrassment flagging problem of 1.


Yes, this is a bit the way foaf:knows works. You can claim you foaf:know anyone.
This does not require them to link back. For a third party an unconfirmed 
foaf:knows
will have less weight (since people can claim they know anyone).

> 
> - Rob.
> 
>