Re: Last call comments from Cisco

Dear Marc,

We appreciate your spending time on following and reviewing the
specification and sending us your comments.
Please find our detailed responses to your comments below.

Please acknowledge receipt of this email to public-geolocation@w3.org
by November 12 2009.
In your acknowledgment please let us know whether or not you are
satisfied with the working group's response to your comment.

On behalf of the W3C Geolocation Working Group, Lars Erik Bolstad, Angel Machin


Marc Linsner wrote:
> Cisco manufactures systems for locating mobile wireless devices,
> locating devices on IP networks, and applications that consume location information.
> The lack of suitable attributes for policy control in the API proposed
> by this WG make the proposed API unusable for many applications. Cisco
> strongly agrees with issue #1 as cited by CDT.  Privacy of location
> data is of huge concern to us and we ask the WG to provide a solution
> that allows transfer of users privacy preferences.
>


The proposal put forward by Geopriv were extensively discussed over a
period of several months before, during, and after the f2f meeting in
December 2008. Both proposals met significant resistance in the
working group and the decision was taken not to adopt either of them.

The discussions and conclusions were tracked here:
Should the Geolocation API include privacy information? :
http://www.w3.org/2008/geolocation/track/issues/2
GEOPRIV WG proposal for privacy within the API :
http://www.w3.org/2008/geolocation/track/issues/4

The fact that the working group decided not to adopt the Geopriv
proposals does not mean that the group didn't manifest concerns about
users' privacy. The intense discussions around this issue did
contribute significantly to the wording of the privacy considerations
section of the specification. The working group concluded that privacy
protection does not belong in the Geolocation API itself, but is
better handled as part of a more generic privacy and security
framework for device access.

The recently formed Device API and Policy Working Group is chartered
to develop precisely such a framework
(http://www.w3.org/2009/05/DeviceAPICharter).


> As to issue #2 in the CDT text, we believe the W3C should perform
> detailed investigation into the possible IPR issues surrounding this
> work to ensure protection of W3C members.


Regarding this point, please see the response sent out to the comments from CDT:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-geolocation/2009Oct/0009.html


> Marc Linsner
> Consulting Engineer, Office of the CTO Cisco Systems, Inc.

Received on Thursday, 29 October 2009 16:37:27 UTC