[uf-discuss] microformats and privacy

[Guillaume Lebleu]

Thom Shannon wrote:
> What is the response to the privacy argument? As a carefree 
> technophile I'm happy publishing personal info on the web. But when 
> you're trying to convince a major social network to add semantics that 
> makes their users personal information easier to harvest and possibly 
> abuse. Is there any answer?
>
Thom,

Last year, I brought up the idea of something I named "hprivacy" and 
presented a very primitive hprivacy html proxy filter prototype with 
three groups: pro, family, friends and public. See 
http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2007-April/009264.html
This is a tiny prototype that is not integrated with a tagged social 
graph, so for now, I simulate the filtering by passing the group in the 
URL. But you'll get the idea.

Some links have moved:
http://lebleu.org/projects/hprivacy/index.php (what the public sees)
http://lebleu.org/projects/hprivacy/index.php?group=family (what a 
family member would see)
http://lebleu.org/projects/hprivacy/index.php?group=friends
http://lebleu.org/projects/hprivacy/index.php?group=pro

See the markup: http://lebleu.org/projects/hprivacy/hcard.html 
(obviously, in real implementation, this would be pulled from a 
non-public folder)

There didn't seem to be much interest on this list. Maybe because it's 
not so much about data formats and/or because it's about marking up 
content that is not public to anyone (microformats seems to have a bias 
toward public content).

Let me know what you think.

Also, someone helped me design a cool logo: http://hprivacy.org

Guillaume