RE: Unverifiable Transactions / Cookie draft

I did not suggest that you should throw up your hands and surrender.
Rather my point is that I do not believe that you have helped protect
user privacy but I do believe that you have hurt a lot of smaller web
sites who are trying to make a living on the web and thus contributed to
the reduction of diversity on the web. I believe that the outcome is
undesirable.
		Yaron

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	M. Hedlund [SMTP:hedlund@best.com]
> Sent:	Friday, March 14, 1997 1:54 AM
> To:	Yaron Goland
> Cc:	'dmerriman@doubleclick.net'; http-wg@cuckoo.hpl.hp.com
> Subject:	RE: Unverifiable Transactions / Cookie draft
> 
> 
> On Thu, 13 Mar 1997, Yaron Goland wrote:
> > I would also point out that besides denying smaller sites revenue,
> > preventing "unverifiable transactions" only puts a very small bump
> in
> > the road of collecting user data. [...]
> > User Privacy - 0
> > Small Web Sites - 0
> 
> It is a misrepresentation to say that there is "0" gain in user
> privacy by
> way of the unverifiable transaction limitation in the cookie RFC.  We
> would
> not have wasted the extensive amount of time we spent on this issue
> for no
> gain.  The specification as written provides reasonable protection for
> users while trying to allow implementors flexibility in user interface
> design.
> 
> I do agree that data sharing can be accomplished through other means
> than
> shared cookies.  However, the concern of the state management subgroup
> was
> crafting a specification that did not create _new_ privacy problems. 
> Because there are other privacy issues on the Web does not mean that
> we
> should throw up our hands and surrender in this specification.
> 
> M. Hedlund <hedlund@best.com>

Received on Friday, 14 March 1997 12:15:21 UTC