Oh, I just had an idea about trying to clamp down on data mining.

Pubs could enforce gossiping only with peers that are n hops from someone they already follow

Right now (afaik), pubs will gossip with anyone that knows their public key. This currently allows anyone that knows a pub's address and key to start spidering the network from that point. They can request the pubs feed, which gives them a list of everyone the pub follows. Then they can request those feeds, and so on. Then they learn about other pubs, and get more feeds etc etc.

However, if pubs checked to make sure that the remote peer was actually a friend or a foaf, then this would make spidering impossible! You'd have to actually get people to follow you first! ooo could still be available to everyone, but getHistoryStream should only be available to people on the pubs hops graph.

#scuttlebot #data-mining