privacy access for likes?
By ura soul
presently likes are all public as far as i am aware..
due to the way that various agencies spider the web for 'research puposes' which many probably would not prefer them to do if they fully knew this was occurring, i think we would be best served to give likes a privacy access level in some way.
any thoughts on this?
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- rjcalifornia@rjcalifornia
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- ura soul@tunist
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You must log in to post replies.Walled Garden should make likes not available to 'spiders'. Not that I think I don't know if spiders are able to index 'elgg likes'
Rodolfo Hernandez
Arvixe/Elgg Community Liaison
Likes do have an access level. By default they inherit the access level of the liked entity.
oh ok, this is not a problem for me presently, i am just thinking ahead.
from a 'privacy first' perspective the access level of likes should be selectable in some way by the one who is 'liking'. i think a global privacy setting for all of a users likes is an effective approach - in that they can choose who sees their likes and then 'like accordingly' safe in the knowledge of who will find out what they like.
It would be terrible UX to have to set privacy when liking (the whole point of which is to give a nod in one click), but it would make sense to have user settings like "who can see my likes?"
Unfortunately Elgg's access levels being always tied to individual items and ACLs makes this hard/impossible. To change "who can see my likes" involves re-saving each like annotation and it's not always possible to find an access_id that works in each context.
E.g. say you're user A and you like an item B owned by user C. It's implied that that C can see the like, and it's reasonable to assume every user who can see B can also see the like. But there is no access_id that will serve as a union of those sets.
At some level users have to expect that on a social site, there's going to be no expectation of privacy for some content/actions.
i don't know enough about the coding of elgg presently to comment on a simple approach to resolving this.. though i am imagining a solution may need not include much more than creaitng a user variable for 'who can see my likes' and then checking against that wherever names of 'likers' are listed.. e.g. a type of 'like gatekeeper' for those views.
how does this issue apply to activity in general? wouldn't privacy be enhanced to also include a 'who can see my activity' setting too? (such as friend connections and other actions).