Plink “has shut down. For now.”

Why? Julian Bond writes at Ecademy, “The interesting thing here is that there are approximately 15 Million structured data files out there on the web in XML of which FOAF is just one type. And the search engines currently do nothing with it. And when a programmer does try to do something, they get abuse from people who don't realize they didn't have any privacy anyway.”

Dom Ramsey writes at rdfweb-dev, “It was fun to do, but I'm now getting way too many complaints from people who have appeared without permission in other people's FOAF files and have found themselves via Google.

Trying to explain FOAF to these people generally doesn't work, and more often than not, they're too irate to care. So the easiest thing for me to do is just take the site down.“

I wrote about this on a CivicSpace developers mailing list, commenting that, “I suspect it may have something to do with the Dean campaign”

Data about Dean volunteers from Dean Commons was available via FOAF and much of it got imported into PLINK. I know that many people accused the Dean campaign of selling its mailing list and were angry and/or confused about the data getting out onto the internet as a whole. I spent a lot of time trying to explain this to people, as did several other people who understood the issue.

As an aside, the standard for the SHA1 hashsum in FOAF is to use the URI of the mailbox, so, as an example, my hashsum is ffe69246682d35f080b865433d08d274d9b19657 which is the sha1 hash of mailto:ahynes1@optonline.net However, in the Dean Commons, they left out the protocol section and assigned a hashsum of ahynes1@optonline.net Because of that, PLINK and the other FOAF crawlers never linked up my FOAF information from the Dean campaign with FOAF information from other sources.

As noted before, there is FOAF information about me at Ecademy, Tribe.net, and LiveJournal. Christian Crumlish points out that PeopleAggregrator and TypePad are also publishing FOAF information. Boris Mann observed that for tools being developed for CivicSpace, “James' FOAF module is opt-in -- the user goes to their account and allows export of the FOAF file. The lesson is to be very careful about privacy issues, and to give the user control.”

I suspect this may be the tip of the iceberg as more and more people discover the power of FOAF and want to take advantage of it, and at the same time want to protect their privacy.