[okfn-discuss] Data that service users consider private, but want to publish from the service

Thu Jul 17 09:43:11 UTC 2008

How broad is as "personal in nature" for the purposes of part 1. of
the Open Software Services Definition? It seems to only include secret
data - for example personal emails, or my private calendar.

There seems to me a category of data which is personal/private, but
where the data is not secret. It is just the user only wants it
using in ways they control. For example:

1) My own blogs posts are data that I'm happy to be publically viewable,
but could be sufficiently personal I don't want to give them away as
open data (e.g. I might want to tell a personal anecdote in context on
my website, but not want it to appear as lines in a broadway musical)

2) I might want to share photos of myself on a photo sharing site for
my friends and anybody in the world to look at there, but for privacy
reasons not want them to be taken and used as the next face of
l'Oreal.

Which leads to the more general question - if the users of a service 
want to manage their own data with the service, but they want that
data to be neither open nor secret (but somewhere inbetween), can the
service still be OSSD?

So for example I could fork gitorious (an open source code hosting
service http://gitorious.org/projects/gitorious), and allow secret
repositories, with a simple interface for getting your data out of
your private repository (git pull :). Call this fictional site
private-gitorious. I think it would comply with the OSSD.

Then suppose I fork gitorious, but let people host in public non-open
source software on it, but for which the source code is available
(e.g. Microsoft shared source style). Call this shared-gitorious. I
would still make the source code of gitorious open (I'd have to, by
the Affero GPL), and obviously people would be able to get their own
data. Indeed, anybody would be able to get anybody's data. Just
*other* people wouldn't be able to reuse it.

In many ways private-gitorious is more "closed" than shared-gitorious,
yet it is, I think, more clearly OSSD compliant.

Apologies if you've covered this already.

Francis

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