RE: <device> proposal (for video conferencing, etc)

Hi,

Apologies for not responding to this earlier, but I was away. Just a
comment on Ian's point about privacy. It depends on the application of
the technology as to whether it is privacy sensitive, as a basis abuse
case - if proximity is used in my house then there are privacy issues -
i.e. I don't want to be burgled. There are a number of other use cases
that could be applied - e.g. if I am using web apps to measure control
data in a large plant this could be subject to attack (for various
reasons). An example is here:

"A recent development in process control is the connection of systems
into the wider supply chain. For example, data from tank level sensors
can be used to trigger automatic re-ordering of products from the
suppliers. This increased connectivity can expose vulnerable process
control systems to external threats from the supplier's systems and
introduce risks to other systems in the supply chain." [1].

The potential future applications for device APIs are quite exciting but
as I've said before we are connecting the physical world to the internet
world and we have to be really careful about how we go about it.

Thanks,


David.

[1] http://www.cpni.gov.uk/Docs/re-20051025-00940.pdf 

-----Original Message-----
From: public-device-apis-request@w3.org
[mailto:public-device-apis-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Ian Hickson
Sent: 17 December 2009 18:38
To: Tran, Dzung D
Cc: public-device-apis@w3.org
Subject: RE: <device> proposal (for video conferencing, etc)

On Thu, 17 Dec 2009, Tran, Dzung D wrote:
> 
> On another note, In the Device API WG, we were looking at sensors as
in 
> such things as: Proximity, NFC, Pressure, Ambient Light, Hall 
> sensors...etc. This seems to fit into your <device> tag.
> 
> Thoughts?

I'm not familiar with NFC sensors. Proximity, pressure, and ambient
light 
sensors seem relatively innocuous from a privacy standpoint and could 
probably just be exposed as events, like the ononline/onoffline feature
in 
HTML5. I'm not sure what the use case for a Hall effect sensor would be.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Monday, 4 January 2010 12:39:56 UTC