Comments on: What to do about promiscuity

By: Pushing String » StoDID podcast

Pushing String » StoDID podcast — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 01:47:56 +0000

[…] In the podcast I mention an exchange between me and Paul Madsen about how to improve informed consent by users; if you’re interested you can find the whole thread by starting here. I had thought that the UI idea he pointed to was a Shibboleth-using project, and it turns out my memory was correct. […]

By: Eve M.

Eve M. — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 21:39:48 +0000

Hi Danny– Your point about the mechanism of mapping within RDF is well-taken (and I do recognize that the article was using RDF a “hook” for the privacy discussion). My point was just that deciding on what concept is actually synonymous with, or encompasses, or encompassed by, something else is tricky and often context-dependent. A first name is often a given (personal) name but not in some cultures, and a Christian name is often a given name but not for people of other religions, etc. If you have three existing databases, each of which uses one of the choices, you’re *probably* safe in mapping them as equivalent but maybe not. Etc. YMMV. It’s just a classic semantics problem — nothing to do with RDF!

And hi Paul– The mockup you point to is indeed interesting! It definitely gives a feel, *at the point of collection*, for how the information will be shared — which is precisely when the user is paying the most attention.

By: Paul

Paul — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 12:11:25 +0000

Informed consent implies ‘informing’ the user not only of what uses are planned for identity but also what will be the consequences (positive or not) of doing so. I blogged an interesting application of this idea at http://connectid.blogspot.com/2006/05/identity-selector-sequence.html

Users are explcitly told how the level of service they will receive at a SP depends on the identity information they choose to release to it.

Wrt a ‘Do what I mean’ button, this might work if it were ‘Do what I’ve said before’, i.e. an indication from the user that they wanted the current identity transaction to be governed by a distant policy (PIP or PDP?) point at which they had previously stored privacy preferences. As it stands, the user ends up with ‘privacy policy siloes’

Tag Boy

By: Danny

Danny — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 11:20:39 +0000

Hmm, if someone freely releases personal information on the Web, and some group uses it for evil purposes, does the fault lie with the person *sharing* their data, or the bad people?

But it’s undeniable that current systems are painfully crude when it comes to privacy, and even if they were a lot more granular, it’s hard to see how the end user could be shielded from any unexpected, unpleasant future use. Antiserendipity?

I agree with you that there is plenty more identity data out there than RDF (must confess it was that acronym that caught my eye ;-), but presumably the article emphasized that because the research in question was using it. I’d also quibble on this point: “hard to do precise equivalence mapping between RDF..schemas”. Such mappings are very easy to express in RDF, and what’s more you may not want precise equivalence mappings, e.g.
x:christianName rdfs:subClassOf foaf:firstName .
Because of this, no matter what the original source of the data (scraped HTML, microformats etc) RDF does offer a good way of expressing and using the mappings, even if it doesn’t solve the human-taxonomy problem.

Incidentally, the RDF approach should be useful at the other end of the system. For the person doing google-before-hiring, something like timbl’s “Oh Yeah” button (to give a logical paper trail of where the info came from) would make nice symmetry with your “do what I mean” button.