IndieWebCamp Popup: Sensitive Data on Your Personal Website
Description
Let's come together to discuss using our websites to host, post, share, and store sensitive data, including medical records, habit logs, personal media files, and private writing.
What are the use cases for posting sensitive data on your own website? What plumbing is needed to host and share sensitive data within (and outside) the IndieWeb? What even is "sensitive" data, anyway?
Session Facilitator: Maxwell Joslyn
Schedule
Hashtag: #verysensitivedata Etherpad for collaborative notes: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/sensitivedata-popup
11-11:05 | Welcomes and introductions
11:05-11:10 | Read, create, and vote on topics
Rest of time | Vigorous discussion!
The wiki page for this event lists numerous potential topics for this session. Please feel free to add to that page, bring up discussion topics in an RSVP post, or propose something at the start of the event.
What's an IndieWeb Popup?
Since the pause on in-person meetups, we've done online Indie Web Camps and Homebrew Website Clubs. We've also started having a new type of event called a popup: a single IWC session as a standalone event.
Until now, popups have been infrequent and irregular. However, for the next few months, we'll be trialing a monthly popup, usually on the last weekend of the month, with the topic to be announced the month before.
Comments
After today's IndieWebCamp popup session, I built a way to create unlisted posts on my site that require a secret key in the URL in order to view.
Since all my URLs are more or less sequential, I needed a way to be able to add something to the URL that is unguessable. It was a relatively easy thing to add!
Try viewing this post without the secret string at the end to see the feature in action: https://aaronparecki.com/2021/06/26/9/MXJEJKW
The prospect of being able to limit access to some of my posts is appealing. I encounter this most often when I want to post photos that include the faces of family members. But it is also true of some “stream” posts that I might like to syndicate to another site, such as micro.blog but which I don’t necessary want to include on my public-facing WordPress site. It is quite possible that there are means of achieving both of these goals as well as others without incorporating any new technologies–I’m still getting the hang of “basic” IndieWeb functions–but I am interested in what more experienced folks have to say about this!
Just realised the next IndieWeb Pop-Up event is going to be all about Sensitive Data on Your Personal Website. I have spoken about this at many occations and even informally during in-person IWCs. Questions always came up when people see me publishing a wide range of information on my site, from home address to phone numbers and gender/sexuality.
Wondering what others think. How much do people take different risk factors into consideration? What more would people be willing to publish? I have been toying with the idea of my tax returns for a while now… Let’s chat!
Another IndieWeb PopUp event to look forward to! I’ve been playing with a mix of public and private content both on this site and over at the new digital garden. It will be fun to dive into that a bit more with others.