Nodalities

Yeah, I think this is extremely important, also for the public perception of the Semantic Web. When I tell people what I do, it's the first concern that springs out, they are worried about the privacy implications. And the demise of plink.org back in the day proves that it can easily be a make or break for any application. The Semantic Web is so powerful, it can scare people too...

I always continue to talk about Policy Aware Web when people bring up that subject, saying "privacy is, contrary to other alternatives, built-in". But the fact is, we're not really using it to any great extent, are we?

How do you respond to Steve Gillmor's point that it is your data, you just didn't record the fact that you gave a copy of it to Facebook, or whoever, when you did so? That seems a valid point to me. It even suggests that there may be a way to prevent social networking sites such as Facebook from making life difficult by creating a browser (plugin) that records the information that you give out in a way that can relatively easily be queried. Some sort of RDF database springs to mind... If I have missed the point, then I'd certainly appreciate the correction to my understanding.

Well, yes, I agree with you, Paul, the ownership of data is current a mess on the Web. I believed that one distinction between Web 2.0 and Web 1.0 was the exposition of ownership of web resources on Web 2.0; but it seems that this ownership issue is still a problem unsolved.

Companies such as Facebook think that they own users' data and exposed social connections since they (such as Facebook) have provided "free" service for the users. So the companies want to make money out of these user-generated resources while at the same time prohibiting other people or organizations taking benefits from them. Although this thought is understandable, it indeed hurts the normal data flow on the Web. This policy set up invisible barriers between web sites and greatly decreases the usability of web data.

More severely, this problem might be inherited by the future Web such as the Semantic Web. If we just feel inconvenient about this problem on Web 2.0, the problem would become intolerable when the Web evolves to be Semantic Web. This is a central issue when we start to think of the fundamentals of Semantic Web.

Yihong

Chris

that is a valid point - is this in a recent Gillmor Gang?

The issue then becomes one of working out how you make use of data from your contacts/friends in the way, for example, that Scoble tried to do. My contact details are mine, and I give a copy to Facebook. Your contact details are yours, and you give a copy to Facebook. That relationship says nothing about what I can do with your contact details, assuming you and I are friends on Facebook. I might (as Scoble did) want to add them to my address book, or transport them to an application other than Facebook. Do I need your permission for that, or Facebook's, or no one's?

This is one of the issues touched upon in my previous post - http://blogs.talis.com/nodalities/2008/01/scoble_facebook_plaxo_open_dat.php

Yihong and Kjetil - absolutely. Hence my concern/interest... This is one that we need to crack.