| home | PinfoNet | Sept. 9, 2008 |
This is how existing problems become evident - when starting with a blank slate.
PinfoNet architecture calls for a person's ability to send PCNs with varying degrees of association, such as to send an email to some people as protected, but to others as public. In the case of the public ones, one could say that all protected (address) information should not be there, but that for protected recipients, it should.
And what are "to", "cc" and "bcc" anyways? These are old conventions for office documents. What the addressing part needs to understand is who can and cannot see the addresses. As it presently stands, the BCC recipients see everyone's addresses but their own, and the CC recipients see everyone's addresses but the BCCs. That's a combination of visibly privileged and invisibly privileged. Everybody is privileged to the address information of the visible. You can have some people overseeing others, but the overseers can't see each other. The most privileged recipients are the least facilitated, on the matter of sharing address information, in the least part for their inability to share their own.
I occasionally use BCC as intended to send a secret copy to someone at a higher level of privilege. Far more often, however, I use BCC to protect the addresses of closer associations from more distant ones. In today's day and age, I BCC every recipient for my email creations, (which just aint PinfoNet).
What people need, for a given transmission, is for some people to be able to share and see each other's addresses, but for others to not. Present-day email technology does not have that capability.
Not all groups are concentric. Perhaps user-defined groups could be made to see other group-member's addresses, with lots of configuration options, and that could become a big design, albeit anthropologically rooted.
It would be nice to be able to see personal information, when desired, within ones own group. It would be nice to dispatch an email to different groups, and mind the addressing protections. In fact, it's looking like the headers are playing a part in how people read their emails - they're examining the lists of recipients, as though that were a part of it! ;-) The only other thing is "blinding" an address, which could be happening by not seeing the addresses outside of one's group. So, I suppose a person would define a group as where people would see each other's addresses.
Cheers -
Mark G. Meyers