I've been wondering whether to get myself a FOAF file. FOAF stands for "friend of a friend" and it is a method of publishing personal information about yourself in a machine-readable format. Or as the FOAF Wiki puts it:
"If you're familiar with 'blogging and providing RSS syndication of the content of your 'blog, then one way to view FOAF is as syndicating yourself."
I have to admit I'm still not sure about publishing personal stuff on the Web. I think this is partly a kiwi thing. Generally speaking New Zealanders are more reserved than, say, Americans. But I'm also concerned about the future potential of FOAF being hit on by marketeers and spammers, in the way that email is now. On the other hand I don't want to be an "anonymous coward", this weblog is my vehicle for publishing to the world so the world needs to know a little bit about me. Hmmm, still thinking about this one...
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Spammers shouldn't be a problem you can avoid publishing anything that provides a contact route to you, other than people you know...
Marketeers are a different point and an interesting one, but if they can't get info to you, it'll only be them having more data on you, which these guys love of course, but would it be valuable without a route to actually do the marketing?
Posted by: Jim Ley | September 8, 2003 3:25 PM
Re spammers: I never underestimate their deviousness. e.g. they could crawl a whole bunch of FOAF files, extract all the data about who you've linked to, then crawl all those links for contact details (email, RSS feeds even). They always pick up your contact details indirectly - e.g. via mailing lists, etc. So even though you don't put contact details in your FOAF, by triangulation over other FOAF files they'll extract them.
Re marketeers, true they'll only be collecting data. But perhaps in future they'll have a use for it - eg for one-to-one purposes.
I don't wish to be Orwellian about all this, but when you're putting personal data on such a public place like the Web...these things need to be considered :-)
Posted by: Richard MacManus | September 8, 2003 4:49 PM
Yes, you can crawl all the foaf files in the world and get the links, but all that gives is people, if they don't have an email address, what value is there in having it? Spam isn't in any way targetted, so the link with mailing lists isn't of any use to them - and you don't need to provide a link between your mailing list and foaf docs if you don't wish (other sha1'd email addresses, or no email addresses at all, the url of your blog is used as a uniquely identifying feature in FOAF. I think there's plenty in place to protect against spammers (at the same time I don't think hiding email addresses is a good attempt at protecting from spammers anyway).
Triangulation over other foaf files to get email addresses is something that should not be possible, people who don't own the data should not be using an sha1'd email address without the owners consent. So there should be no way to get other peoples email addresses via foaf docs without consent, hopefully peer pressure is enough for this.
As to marketeers, one-on-one info is always available, and I'm not sure foaf really helps much compared to blogs etc. Maybe.
This is certainly always very often discussed in the FOAF world.
Posted by: Jim Ley | September 9, 2003 3:39 AM
Thanks Jim, I'll keep an eye out for those FOAF discussions. I've pretty much decided to do a FOAF file for my weblog, or at least a form of "author's bio" like you see in books. Definitely there is value in telling the world a bit about yourself.
Posted by: Richard MacManus | September 9, 2003 1:17 PM