A microformat for relationship availability and preference?

On 12/20/06, Angus McIntyre <anguspobox.com> wrote:
> There are all kinds of inferences that it's dangerous
to draw from an
> incomplete description.

I concur, Microformats allow us to publish information, but
the
absence of them shouldn't be taken as conveying information.

> Which raises the whole question for me with XFN, which
is a practical
> one, rather than a technical one: do we really want the
world to know
> all that stuff about us?

Yes, quite.

Inherent in the Microformats movement is the desire to make
information easier to publish and aggregate, but people need
to
consider carefully what parts they want to make available
about
themselves and their relationships to others.

In my day job, I keep seeing places where an hCard would be
useful
where organisations are publishing contact information, but
far from
wanting to make it easily parsable they seem to put all
their efforts
into trying to obfuscate it to avoid getting more spam!

-Ciaran McNulty
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Am Donnerstag, 21. Dezember 2006 11:10 schrieb Ciaran
McNulty:

> In my day job, I keep seeing places where an hCard
would be useful
> where organisations are publishing contact information,
but far from
> wanting to make it easily parsable they seem to put all
their efforts
> into trying to obfuscate it to avoid getting more spam!

Legal, but futile. Obfuscation is never a good concept to
avoid bad things. 
Any hidden secret information is at some time revealed. You
may make it 
harder, but you can't make it impossible for spammers to
grab your email 
address.

At least here in Germany it is enforced by law that anybody
putting some page 
on the internet for public access has to include a socalled
"impressum" which 
at least has to contain name, postal address, telephone
number and email 
address. For commercial pages there are still more
requirements. This is to 
clearly state who is responsible for whatever is publicly
accessible on the 
internet. And it is enforced by law to not obfuscate these
data beyond a 
point that any human user can use it. This excludes
definitely publishing 
these information as f.ex. image, since there are human
users who don't use 
graphical browsers. I do only know of two legal
"obfuscation" methods: 1. 
entity-encoding and 2. reversing direction. You could
clearly see that both 
are very weak obfuscation methods, but more is not allowed.
So you simply 
_have_ to publish your email address, if you do have any
public accessible 
web page.

So using obfuscation makes it only slightly harder for
spammers to find your 
email address, but much harder for legal users. On the other
side hCard has 
nearly no impact on email harvesting for spamming, but it
makes it lot easier 
for legal users to get that address.

But sure you may decide freely about what additional
information you are 
giving away about yourself. Personal relationships and
publishing them are 
your personal decision, noone enforces you to anything here.
The main problem 
here arises through "bad elements". Let's assume
you have a link to a friend, 
clearly stating him to be a friend. This friend has another
link to another 
friend, and so on. Then assume a friend of a friend of a
friend ... of your 
friend is a terrorist. It would take seconds for FBI to
knock on your door.

On the other side it would take only few more seconds if you
have a simple 
link to your friend without XFN markup. So in the end it is
your decision: 
Are you paranoid? Then you should stay away from the
internet. Fear the 
internet like hell. In the internet there is no privacy. Or
do you accept 
giving up large parts of your privacy for the sake of
communication, 
interaction and maybe friends? Then you have to accept
getting spam and other 
bad things, too. It's a bad world out there. 

It is not easy to decide here. But either go left or right.
Trying some middle 
way is futile.
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On 21/12/06, Ciaran McNulty <mailciaranmcnulty.com>
wrote:
> On 12/20/06, Angus McIntyre <anguspobox.com> wrote:
> > There are all kinds of inferences that it's
dangerous to draw from an
> > incomplete description.
>
> I concur, Microformats allow us to publish information,
but the
> absence of them shouldn't be taken as conveying
information.
>
> > Which raises the whole question for me with XFN,
which is a practical
> > one, rather than a technical one: do we really
want the world to know
> > all that stuff about us?
>
> Yes, quite.
>
> Inherent in the Microformats movement is the desire to
make
> information easier to publish and aggregate, but people
need to
> consider carefully what parts they want to make
available about
> themselves and their relationships to others.


Just to briefly step back to another "principle" -
using microformats
does not mean you should be publishing things you would not
normally.

For example, if you wouldn't normally publish your phone
number -
don't start now just because you want to use the tel part of
hCard.
Same goes for XFN.  If you don't already say "I'm this
person's
wife/colleague.. etc" don't start doing it!  A person
probably
shouldn't start publishing information themselves that they
were not
originally comfortable with broadcasting.  It's personal
choice, and
all optional. ;)

-- 
Frances Berriman
http://fberriman.com
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On 21 Dec 2006, at 10:10, Ciaran McNulty wrote:
> Inherent in the Microformats movement is the desire to
make
> information easier to publish and aggregate, but people
need to
> consider carefully what parts they want to make
available about
> themselves and their relationships to others.
>
> In my day job, I keep seeing places where an hCard
would be useful
> where organisations are publishing contact information,
but far from
> wanting to make it easily parsable they seem to put all
their efforts
> into trying to obfuscate it to avoid getting more spam!


With this issue, it makes no difference whether you publish 

microformats or not. Phone numbers and email addresses (even
postal  
addresses) are all parsable without microformats — with
sufficient  
effort and regular expression complexity.

Spammers will go to that effort; it's their business to
gleen  
information to abuse. I'm sure they'd be delighted to find
hCards to  
parse and make their lives a little easier, but I don't see
that it  
gives them any information that they wouldn't have got
otherwise,  
through other means.

As always, the only way to keep information private on the
internet  
is not to publish it in the first place.

Ben

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