Tue, 01 Apr 2008
Pervasive Privacy on Weblogs?
Is there any Free Software out there supporting pervasive privacy in weblogs?
What does it take for decent support of privacy:
- Not leaking that postings exist at all. This means that there should be some plausible deniability (configurable, though) that no new posts exist. No message that you are not allowed to view it.
- Pervasive integration: next entry and previous entry links must not refer to the private entry, possibly leaking the post's title through the permalink. If the software integrates a search engine it must not search in entries the user is not allowed to look at. (Or display excerpts, FWIW.)
- If possible integrate with the comments feature to allow both authenticated comments and post filters. OpenID integration is a big plus here. Passwords should be supported, too.
- Allow the use of groups (filters) to limit certain posts to certain groups of friends.
- Support tokenized RSS/Atom feeds without HTTP authentication. (I.e. generate a secret per-user token which authenticates the feed request and then display the restricted view on the posts.)
I tried the Privacy plugin for Movable Type 4, but it failed. It has some nice ideas like OpenID support, but it is not pervasive at all, leaking posts all over the place.
So is there anything out there satisfying at least some of the criteria or do I need to learn Perl and to hack this into Movable Type?
(The general point of "not posting private stuff you really don't want to leak" should not be reiterated, though. It is my own server and it boils down to trust anyway.)