[Data-modeling] "Public person" and privacy

[Kirrily Robert]

A while ago I posted here raising the subject of privacy concerns wrt  
some of the properties on the "Person" type.  At the time, we were  
thinking of splitting those sensitive properties out into a co-type  
called "Public person" and only applying it to people like  
celebrities, rather than ordinary private individuals like you and me  
(presumably).

However, we found that this simply doesn't work.  For instance, if you  
say that people's family members are only of interest when you're  
dealing with public people, then you go and set the details of eg.  
Brad and Angelina's kids, then the kids get typed as "Public person"  
and it spreads out from there.  Basically it's too easy to  
accidentally co-type someone as a "Public person".

So we've come round to the idea that what we really need are just  
clear community standards for what level of personal information is  
reasonable to include in Freebase, and very clear information about  
the fact that anything someone puts in Freebase will be made public  
possibly forever.  We're going to be working on this document soon,  
and would value any thoughts/input from the community.  We may also  
add some UI features to eg. make it harder to accidentally add  
inappropriate personal information, but that's not decided as yet.   
What we do know is that the documentation/guidelines will have to be  
in place anyway, so we'll be doing that first.

K.

-- 
Kirrily Robert
Freebase Community Director
kirrily at metaweb.com
http://freebase.com/