Subject: [Simple] 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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