Re: Work in Progress on Geolocation Working Group (Advance Notice)

Hi, Ashok, Phil-

ashok malhotra wrote:
>
>> The Geolocation Working Group would be tasked with developing 
>> an interface for accessing location information in a secure and 
>> privacy- sensitive manner ...
>
> I did not see a work item covering policies for security and privacy. 
> Did I miss something?

Ashok, security and privacy have been a central part of many discussions 
of this topic in various quarters... it's certainly part of the planned 
considerations, and it's just not clear yet how it will be worked in. 
Thanks for bringing it up, and please monitor this activity for progress 
(and participate if you have ideas!).


Phil Archer wrote (on 6/3/08 10:02 AM):
> 
> This is a very interesting piece of work and one that, if my time
> allows, The Family Online Safety Institute would want to contribute to.
> The privacy and security issues are incredibly important and, however
> it's done, the end user MUST remain in control of their location data.
> 
> You'd need to support a variety of settings such as
> 1. always off (i.e never disclose your location)
> 2. always on
> 3. Only reveal my location to the following services...
> 4. Ask me every time someone wants to know where I am


Phil, not only that, but I might like to control the degree of precision 
with which any given service can pinpoint me.  If I'm looking for pizza 
places in a small city, might like the business-locater to only know 
what town I'm in, not my exact latitude and longitude... or I might want 
to give it out within a margin of error of a mile or so.

And as you mention, this should be opt-in, and where kids are involved, 
or passing data to third parties (even parents), we need to tread very 
carefully.  Maybe some sort of override "opt-out" setting that can be 
set by the parent?  I'm not yet certain that this is in the scope of the 
Geolocation API deliverable, but it might well be.  We need to balance 
user benefits and market needs versus security and privacy.

Regards-
-Doug Schepers
W3C Team Contact, SVG, CDF, and WebAPI

Received on Tuesday, 3 June 2008 16:02:14 UTC