[Data-modeling] Privacy, public figures, etc

[Bryan Cheung]

Some other points to consider:

1. Say a user is browsing a company topic, and knows a friend that  
works at that company.  Trying to be a good freebaser, he/she decides  
to enter his/her friend's information as an employee.  If we had the  
distinction of public vs. private person and the ECT of person on the  
type Employment tenure was Public Person, he/she would have  
inadvertently just added/updated his/her friend's person-topic as a  
public person by entering in their employment history on the company  
topic.

2. Organization membership could also have privacy implications.   
Would I necessarily want someone to know that I am a card-holding  
member of the NRA, or some other more controversial organization?

Bryan


On Mar 5, 2008, at 11:58 AM, 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.
>
>
> -- 
> Kirrily Robert
> Freebase Community Director
> kirrily at metaweb.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> Data-modeling mailing list
> Data-modeling at freebase.com
> http://lists.freebase.com/mailman/listinfo/data-modeling