[uf-discuss] Authenticity of Authoritative hCard (was: Re: Vote on this: rel="me self" to indicate an authoritative hCard)

[Ben Ward]

On 31 Jan 2007, at 15:50, Ara Pehlivanian wrote:
> Yes, but what if someone registers ben-ward.net and puts up a fake
> card on that site. Then he goes and publishes a partial hCard on
> myspace and points to ben-ward.net/about with rel="self me". He's
> effectively hijacked your identity and/or caused confusion and there's
> no real way to verify who's who or who's telling the truth.

That's still no different to life without rel="me self".

I happen to own the domains <ben-ward.co.uk> and <ben-ward.com>. Note  
hyphens. I do not own <benward.com> , <benward.co.uk>  nor any other  
variant.

Domains do not prove identity. What I can do is make my entire  
‘online identy’ parsable by linking between my domains and my social  
network profiles using rel="me". That doesn't tell you anything more  
about me as a person than the fact that <flickr/photos/benward>, <ben- 
ward.co.uk> and <myspace.com/benwardcouk> are part of the same  
personal network of sites.

The owner of Ben-Ward.net could have his own personal network of  
sites too, but they would not be linked to from my own authoritative  
hCard at ben-ward.co.uk/about. Nothing stops him add rel="me" to his  
hcard pointing to my site, but that takes us well out of scope of  
hcard, and is still a different issue — not something introduced by  
@rel="me self"

Ben