Version of API supporting privacy rules and civic addressing

Hi all,

Following up on a number of threads on this list, Richard Barnes, 
Alissa Cooper and (to a lesser extent) I have been working on a 
version of the current spec that includes support for privacy rules 
and civic addressing. The suggested revision is available at 
http://geopriv.dreamhosters.com/w3c-spec/spec-source.html.  It would 
be great to get a discussion going on the list about it in advance of 
the face-to-face meeting next week.

The big changes from the current working draft are in the Position 
interface section, the Security and privacy considerations section, 
and the Use cases section (although there are minor changes to other 
sections as well). The Position interface supports new attributes 
corresponding to privacy rules and civic addresses. The Security and 
privacy considerations section goes into detail about what the 
behaviors of the recipients of location should be in response to 
receiving privacy rules. That section also details the kind of 
support that UAs would need to provide in order to allow users to 
express their privacy preferences and to have those preferences 
conveyed as appropriate to the recipients of location. We created the 
structure of the privacy rules and the corresponding location 
recipient and UA behaviors to be consistent with the analogous 
concepts developed by the Geopriv WG at the IETF.  In the Use cases 
section, we added text to each of the use cases to demonstrate the 
functionality of the privacy rules.  Although the proposed draft does 
not implement every aspect of Geopriv, we believe that it would be an 
appropriate way for this WG to address the privacy concerns that 
relate to location information (and would, in the end, make an 
important contribution to the protection of privacy).

Because -- as is clear from the discussions on this list -- privacy 
issues can be difficult and the implications of the support for 
privacy rules in particular may not be immediately apparent, we think 
that it would be useful to develop an accompanying document with a 
series of extended examples to demonstrate how the new functionality 
could work in practice. We're interested to know if others think this 
might be useful too.

We look forward to your feedback.

John

Received on Thursday, 4 December 2008 02:47:51 UTC