Re: w/r/t Privacy

Hi Kats,

On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 4:55 AM, Kartikaya Gupta
<lists.geolocation@stakface.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 3 Nov 2008 14:43:33 -0800, Greg Bolsinga <bolsinga@apple.com> wrote:
>>
>> If the Geolocation specification has differing UI or warning
>> expiration requirements than a given platform, I believe it will be
>> for the worse.
>
> Agreed.
>
>> In this situation, web pages requiring location
>> services will behave differently than the platform. If the location
>> services are granted, and suddenly expire without user interaction,
>> the user will think something is broken because it doesn't work like
>> the rest of the platform. If they are presented with more options than
>> allow or don't allow (and are asked too often) they will ignore these
>> warnings and get annoyed with them (see Vista security dialogs for a
>> case study).
>>
>
> In this situation (i.e. on the iPhone), yes. But that doesn't mean it's true in general. In fact, the same argument could be made to reach the opposite conclusion. There may be a platform that already exposes a UI to the user that is Geopriv-compatible. In this case, the simple allow/don't-allow dialog from Geolocation would make the user think something is broken because it wouldn't let them fine-tune the location usage rules the way the platform UI does. The user might be *expecting* their location data to automatically be wiped after 24 hours (based on Alissa's previous emails of the Geopriv default), and will think the web pages/web browser are broken because they keep the location data indefinitely by default.
>

I don't think you read Greg's argument correctly. He is saying that if
we were to mandate a privacy policy in the spec, then necessarily some
implementations would end up having different privacy policies for the
Web vs the rest of the platform. Which is bad. So, in your example and
according to Greg's reasoning, in order to achieve a consistent UI,
the UA should implement the same Geopriv-compatible policy as the rest
of the platform.

> (Note that I don't have much of an opinion one way or another on the larger issue, but it seemed to me that your reasoning in this argument was somewhat flawed).
>

IMHO, it wasn't flawed. It seems to me that your argument is based on
the implicit but false premise that the Greg advocated a simple
allow/don't allow permission dialog. But this is the exact opposite of
Greg's argument! So, in effect, you make the case for the Geolocation
API spec *not enforcing* a particular privacy mechanism.

Thanks,
Andrei

Received on Tuesday, 4 November 2008 13:06:31 UTC