[afzalive]

I dunno about this. Agent discovery is needed, yes. But I don't trust the tech companies right now to do this in a privacy preserving manner. I feel like it'll be used to collect all sorts of data not intended for the parties. Even in the flight ticket example, a third-party insurance or ad-tech company could listen to the request for ticket prices and determine intent to travel (including destination and dates).

[srulyrosenblat]

There are definitely privacy tradeoffs here, it comes with the territory. But there are mitigations against third-party snooping.

In Nostr's case, for example, you can swap out keys between public broadcasts (people looking for travel agents don't need a high degree of trust), keep each broadcast as self-contained as possible, and human-gate them.

I am still playing with a few ideas for making this more private, but ultimately the level of privacy comes down to whatever mitigations the agent owner puts in place. I personally envision broadcasting as more of a first step before moving onto end to end encrypted private conversations.