[Data-modeling] Privacy, public figures, etc

[Faye Li]

This decision shows Metaweb going the extra mile in upholding online 
user privacy, and I wholeheartedly applaud it. A family member who works 
with fraud detection has always cautioned me against making personal 
info public online. Most people can be correctly and uniquely identified 
by financial and insurance companies using just the combination of the 
person's name, birth date, and city of residence. You've pointed out the 
dangers of making other even more sensitive info public.

I like the idea of separating public figures from the rest of us who 
wish to hold on to the naive notion of privacy just a little longer. 
Wikipedia's article creation/deletion wars as a result of their 
notability rule and the power users' (somewhat irregular/subjective) 
enforcement of it I'd like to see Freebase avoid. Since anyone can add a 
type to a topic, using your example, if someone wanted to fill out your 
family member's personal information, what's to stop that user from 
doing that? And if removed, what's to prevent the same info from being 
entered in again?

-- Faye


Kirrily Robert wrote:
> A while ago I signed up for online banking and, as online banking systems tend to do, it asked me not only for a password but for some additional question/answer pairs to help me sort things out if I lost or forgot that password.  I looked at the list of suggested questions, and saw things like:
>
> - Mother's maiden name
> - Your high school's mascot
> - Town where you were born
>
> It occurred to me that almost every item on that list of questions was something that you could find in Freebase, if a person's properties were filled in completely.  As you can imagine, this could be a bit scary if someone used the information in FB to login to your online banking.
>
> When you sign up for Freebase you get a "user profile" and then there's a field to link it to a "Person topic about me".  That person topic then lets you fill in your mother's maiden name, your high school, the town where you were born, and so forth.  I suspect that some people do this a bit naively, hardly thinking about how it could be used for identity theft.  (None of *us*, of course!  Me, I filled in my mother's maiden name in the full and complete knowledge that the world can use it to access to my bank statements ;))
>
> But now my mother and father have nodes in Freebase, and what's to stop someone coming along and filling in *their* mother's maiden names, high schools, etc?  Or for that matter, points that might be sensitive for various reasons, like "weight" or "religion"?
>
> So there's been a bit of discussion around the place about changing the "Person" topic to be less privacy-invading, and moving some of the properties to a new type called "Public person", which we can use for well-known public figures and famous people whose privacy is, let's face it, already pretty well invaded.  That way we can record the weight of professional athletes or celebrities with eating disorders, or the religion of Presidents of the USA, or the genealogy of historical figures, without doing the same to ordinary people like you or me.
>
> If we did this, we'd probably then go through and type anyone who has a Wikipedia article as a "public person" for starters.  If they meet Wikipedia's notability criteria, then their birthdates and so forth are probably public knowledge anyway.  Also, we'd need to write a FAQ or guideline somewhere about what makes someone a public person, and when you should (or shouldn't) apply that type.
>
> Anyone got any thoughts on this?
>
> K.
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