Can you stop your real-world friends from divulging your friendship to 3rd parties? Would you even presume to have any standing to do so?
I think a case could be made that knowledge that <A friend B> belongs to A and B equally and that neither has standing to preclude the other from sharing that fact. Of course they could both mutually agree to such an arrangement ahead of time, but outside of such an agreement, I have a hard time seeing the case for "B prevents A from telling C that A and B are friends".
Another aspect of this though, is "how much can A tell C about B without permission from B?" We know that IRL, people do get angry when friends reveal overly personal details about their lives to others, so this is definitely something to consider.
Not every interaction is or should be freely licensed to both parties.
Agreed. And I am not arguing that it is, or should be. But the mere fact that two people are friends seems to me, at first blush, to be something that normally either person would be free to share.
So there aren't things known between my friends and I that we wouldn't want divulged to a third-party?
I'm not sure how you got that from what I said above. Obviously there are such things. But I do think it's an open question to what extent we can compel our friends to keep things private. Of course if someone is really a "friend" you would expect them to keep confidences if requested... that's part of the definition of "friend" in my mind.
Then we have to dispense away with the whole privacy nonsense that runs rampant on HN concerning things such as ad tracking, location tracking and other data metrics. Because in that case, instead of the friend giving away our data, it's a 3rd party with whom we have a voluntary relationship with who is giving away THEIR data that we generate.
Surely that could be solved by crypto? I.e. you don't actually get a list of names, but list of asymmetric keys, and when your friend joins their key can match the one in my list?
