This weekend an online virtual IndieWebCamp took place. One of the topics discussed and worked upon has my strong interest: making it possible to authorise selective access to posts.

Imagine me writing here about my intended travel. This I would want to share with my network, but not necessarily announce publicly until after the fact. Similarly, let’s say I want some of those reading here to get an update about our little one, then I’d want to be able to indicate who can have access to that posting.

In a platform like FB, and previously on Google plus with its circles, you can select audiences for specific postings. Especially the circles in Google allowed fine grained control. On my blog it is much less obvious how to do that. Yet, there are IndieWeb components that would allow this. For instance IndieAuth already allows you to log-in to this website and other platforms using your own URL (much like Facebook’s login can be used on multiple sites, although you really don’t want to do that as it lets FB track you across other sites you use). However, for reading individual postings that have restricted access, it would require an action made by a human (accepting the authorisation request), which makes it impractical. Enter AutoAuth, based on IndieAuth, that allows your site to log-in to mine without human intervention.

Martijn van de Ven and Sven Knebel worked on this, as sketched out in the graph below.

Selective access to content inside a posting
Now, once this is working, I’d like to take it one step further still. The above still assumes I have postings for all and postings for some, and that implies writing entire postings with a specific audience in mind. More often I find I am deliberately vague on some details in my public postings, even though I know some of my network reading here can be trusted with the specifics. Like names, places, photos etc. In those instances writing another posting with that detailed info for restricted access does not make much sense. I’d want to be able to restrict access to specific sentences, paragraphs or details in an otherwise public posting.

This is akin to the way government document management systems are slowly being adapted, where specific parts in a document are protected by data protection laws, while the document itself is public by law. Currently balancing those two obligations means human intervention before sharing, but slowly systems are being adapted to knowing where in documents restricted access material is located. Ideally I want a way of marking up text in a posting like this so that it is only send out by the webserver when an authorisation like sketched above is available.

So that a posting like this is entirely possible:

“Today we went to the zoo with the < general access > little one < / general access > < friends only > our little one’s name < / friends only >

< general access > general IMAGE of zoo visit< / general access >
< friends only > IMAGE with little one’s face< / friends only >