Subject: [Geopriv] Individuals, hats and spheres

From: Henning Schulzrinne <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 07 Sep 2003 14:04:41 -0400

For access control to presence and geo data, there seem to be two use 
cases that almost all discussions circle back to: spheres and individuals.

By spheres I mean the various parts that most of us divide our life 
into, the different 'hats' that we wear, as member of a family, as an 
employee, as a member of various voluntary organizations ranging from 
the professional assocations like the IEEE and IETF to religious 
organizations and social organizations like the Boy Scouts or bowling 
league.

Many of the use cases can be boiled down to "if I'm in one sphere, I 
don't people in another sphere to see what I'm doing". (Here, I think is 
what I'm doing is mostly the important aspect if you exclude total 
strangers that could do me physical harm, where simple knowledge of 
location matters. For privacy, it is mostly that location is a good 
indication of activity and interests.)

The discussion so far always seems to make the work/home distinction, 
but before "Bowling Alone", people also had many other spheres in what I 
gather is commonly called "civil society". If somebody is with the scout 
group on an outing, the may want the other scout masters to be able to 
find where they are, but they probably don't want them to track them the 
rest of the week.

The rules discussion in GEOPRIV and, to a lesser extent, in SIMPLE, have 
tried to approximate these spheres, by location, time or other hints, 
but for a variety of reasons, this doesn't always work well. 
(Time-of-day fails when people have schedules more complicated than 
factory workers; location fails for road warriors and placetype fails 
for people working at home.)

Thus, my proposal: RPID adds a <sphere> element that has a few standard 
labels, such as 'home' and 'work', with other labels that can be added. 
The primary purpose of this information is not so much in the NOTIFY, 
but in the PUBLISH phase. The idea is that I can publish my 'sphere' and 
this will automatically switch between different modes of visibility, 
different sets of rules. In the rule language being discussed in 
GEOPRIV, this might take the form

Person        sphere    access
-------------------------------------------------------
boss@work     work      location,activity
friend        home      busy/idle
spouse        home,work location
bowling buddy bowling   location

Note that this is not a group as traditionally understood - the same 
person may well share multiple spheres with me. Also, unlike groups, the 
visibility depends on my activity, not just a membership in a list.

While the sphere information would often have to be derived manually, it 
is plausible that external hints can be used. Sometimes location will 
do, but only in the narrowest sense ("at work site"). Time will only be 
useful if users are meticulous about keeping calendars and have very 
regular schedules. Other hints are probably better, such as being logged 
into a VPN for work, or wearing a work badge.

The current RPID <placetype> and <activity> come close, but are not 
quite the same.

I'd appreciate comments.

Henning

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---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 9 Sep 2003 09:14:57 -0400

>> I like the idea of enabling a certain set of rules (as 
>opposed to have conditional single
>> rules, the condition being e.g., the identity of the 
>watcher) based on a certain condition. 
>> However, I was wondering whether this is intended to be 
>bound to the <sphere> element? 
>> Let me try to describe the underlying, general method that I 
>understood from your proposal:
>>    Allow for enabling a defined set of rules based on a 
>certain condition, in which the
>> condition would be a certain value/range of an RPID element. 
>
>That is indeed the general problem. However, here, my objective is far 
>narrower. I'm trying to capture one aspect of the 
>condition/context/state of the presentity, namely its role-based 
>interaction with other humans. There are many other variables, such as 
>time, space, other physical measurements ("it's hot, so don't bother 
>me") - all of which may be combined to select a certain set of 
>permissions. Indeed, the core ruleset discussed in GEOPRIV 
>contains some 
>of these conditions (time, space).
>
>I just happen to believe that for access to information about human 
>activities, our relationship to humans and how we divide our 
>life is one 
>of the more important items.

Agree.

>
>> 
>> Hence, with this understanding of your proposal in mind, 
>would it be possible/desirable to
>> use other RPID elements? In this, I could define a set of 
>rules that is enabled when 
>> <placetype> is "work" or <activity> is "meeting". 
>
>That is certainly possible and useful, in my view. I wanted to start 
>small, with a broad brush. It might again be helpful to enumerate some 
>plausible examples of privacy policies that real people are likely to 
>use. I found that in many cases, the <placetype> or <activity> 
>is really 
>just a stand-in for "a part of my world that has distinct assumptions, 
>expectations, obligations and conventions". I'm not a sociologist, so 
>maybe there's a better term for this than sphere.

I do see <sphere> as a starting point for such division of rule sets. The actual
mechanism though should not be limited to this one entry. It is then up to further
studies what other elements would make sense to be used for such rule division. These
elements could be existing ones or even ones to be defined in the future.

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 9 Sep 2003 14:41:27 +0300

Quick answer below.

 > -----Original Message-----
 > From: ext [email-masked] 
 > [mailto:[email-masked]]
 > Sent: 09 September, 2003 10:06
 > To: [email-masked]; Trossen Dirk (NRC/Boston)
 > Cc: [email-masked]; [email-masked]
 > Subject: RE: [Simple] Re: [Geopriv] Individuals, hats and spheres
 > 
[snip]
 > 
 > Dimension, perhaps.
 > 
 > Just a few questions:
 > 
 > - Why is a sphere different than a group?
 > 
 > - Why this type of analogy is limited to geoloc? 
 > 
 > - How this is different from the stream-header we had in PUBLISH?

I think you mean the Facet header, with which the problem is that we're not limited to publishing presence only. Spheres make sense for presence but have little meaning when publishing, say, MWI state information.

Cheers,
Aki

 > /Hisham
 > > > Dirk
 > > Simple mailing list
 > > [email-masked]
 > > https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/simple
 > > 
 > 
 > Simple mailing list
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 >