Re: Public comments regarding the TPE last call document

Hi David,

Thank you for your comments (last June) on the TPE Last Call Working Draft. While we appreciate your concerns, your response did not raise new issues that needed to be resolved by the group.

Your criticism of the W3C consensus progress is long-standing; however this procedural criticism does not raise any substantive issues with the TPE.

Your disagreement that TPE has an unfair bias against third parties is also not a new argument.  This issue has previously been resolved by the group in its definitions of "party" and "context."

The requirements on when user agents may send DNT:1 signals on behalf of a user as detailed in Section 4 of the TPE. The group previously rejected providing more detailed requirements; you do not provide new information or a proposal to cause us to reopen this issue. We revisited this issue during the Last Call process in considering a proposal to require information about the DNT setting party within the DNT field, but that proposal was rejected by the group.

See also: TPE Last Call comments, re: validation of user signals (issue-260)
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-tracking-comments/2015Jun/0008.html

You do not present new information to revisit the definition of tracking, nor do you propose any concrete alternatives (other than not defining tracking, which has been rejected by the group).  Most if not all of the use cases you come up with have previously been discussed by the group.  There is a continuing open issue for whether the standard should eventually include additional explanatory language for implementers; we will continue to revisit that issue over time.

Your last point is factually incorrect: The working group previously resolved to include support for the exception mechanism as a mandatory element of the TPE.

Please let us know whether these explanations resolve your concerns.

Thanks,
Nick Doty, W3C
(for Tracking Protection Working Group Co-Chairs: Carl, Justin and Matthias)