Re: Privacy and HTTP intermediaries

On 03/05/2011, at 12:16 PM, Thomson, Martin wrote:

> On 2011-05-03 at 11:47:45, Mark Nottingham wrote:
>> On 03/05/2011, at 11:10 AM, Thomson, Martin wrote:
>> 
>>> Does the value of the Cache-Control header have any bearing on whether 
>>> something is logged?
>> 
>> Nope.
>> 
>> I suppose you could read Cache-Control: no-store has having those 
>> semantics, but it doesn't in any implementation I'm aware of. Perhaps 
>> we need to clarify that.
> 
> With my privacy nut hat on, it would be nice if that could be added.  It's certainly consistent with the definition of no-store.
> 
> I'm not expecting the guidance to have any teeth, nor for it to have any impact on implementations, but there's a definite advantage to having text to that effect.
> 
> There is the question about non-caching intermediaries that might otherwise perform logging.  They aren't always going to look at Cache-Control unless they need to (for no-transform), so a caveat along the lines of "this is NOT a reliable or sufficient mechanism" might need to be added for this.
> 
> That leaves me with (for p6, S3.2.1 & S3.2.2):
> 
>  An intermediary that performs logging (whether or not it implements a cache) MUST NOT perform logging for requests or responses with a no-store directive.

The problem is that a) this will make lots of existing implementations non-conformant, and b) people will start emitting no-store everywhere to control logging, killing caching in the process. 

I'm afraid the horse has already bolted here...

Cheers,


--
Mark Nottingham   http://www.mnot.net/

Received on Tuesday, 3 May 2011 02:23:48 UTC