Problem with Public Favourites

[baltimorefan]

I don't want to reveal that I'm following pornstar x or political party y.

[oakes]

There are a few possibilities. We could define a way to make metadata private, which is feasible but complicated. The other possibility is to allow you to manage multiple users at once, so you can keep the porn-star-favoriting account separate from the one you share with friends. I definitely intend on allowing the latter, and I think that may solve this issue.

[baltimorefan]

My girlfriend doesn't want me to favourite my ex-girlfriend... See, I need the former solution. :-)

[Arceliar]

The "former" solution is fun to think about. Here's roughly what I come up with as a relatively non complicated way to do it.

Suppose I had a post, file, or whatever that I wanted to share with only Alice and Bob, but not the rest of my friends. The contents of the post could be encrypted with a key used just for that post. The key to decrypt it could then be signed once with the public key of each friend you want to have see the post and included with it--in this case, one key for Alice and one for Bob. Each friend decrypts their copy of the post's key and uses it to decrypt the post.

One thing to consider is that, if you have say 1000 friends and share a post with half of them, that's 500 keys worth of data you need to share, assuming that keys are not re-used. Probably not noticeable for a video or photo album, but adds up quickly for relatively short text posts.

Some of this overhead can be removed by grouping friends google+ circles style, and having group members share a key to read posts. The shared group key would still need to be sent to each person, so that would involve some overhead, but it would only need to happen when a group key changes because you removed a person or something like that.

Something like the above doesn't look like it would be terribly difficult to do, but on principle, the ability to easily maintain multiple identities seems like it's more important from where I'm sitting, so I'm actually more interested in the "latter" solution.

[Pim0]

Yea, please give an option to hide who I'm following. This already bothered me with Twitter. G+ got it right.

[oakes]

Just released version 0.0.15, which allows you to manage multiple accounts. I don't have any near-term plans to implement private metadata, but I am not ruling it out.