Privacy changes in DAP Last Call of HTML Media Capture

Dear PING members: [cc’d DAP]

Thank you for offering to take a look at the recently published Device APIs (DAP) Last Call documents [1]. 

You are correct, DAP did change the privacy and security considerations section in HTML Media Capture to be non-normative, in fact I drafted the revision. This was a deliberate decision since we had implementer feedback on testability - creating a consistent test across user agents that may take a different approach to user interaction was problematical (to give one example).

As I’ve mentioned previously, I believe privacy requires an end-end system view and that view is that of the consumer of our component specifications, such as the browser vendors. Thus I would expect them to perform a privacy analysis and consider a consistent and uniform approach toward user interaction. 

We haven’t removed the material, it is simply worded using English to say what should be done in broad strokes. I expect that privacy will become (and believe it already is) a competitive differentiator for browser vendors; we have shared the information that can inform the implementations and adopters of the technology.

I hope this helps.

regards, Frederick

Frederick Hirsch, Nokia
Chair DAP
@fjhirsch

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-device-apis/2014Jun/0078.html

For reference the documents that went to last call were the following (please note that this is a return from CR to address very specific implementation issues):

[[

(1) HTML Media Capture  - http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-html-media-capture-20140619/

Made security and privacy considerations section non-normative to address testability and implementation concerns.

(2) Ambient Light Events - 
http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-ambient-light-20140619/


Removed the LightLevelEvent and updated the document correspondingly, in response to implementer feedback.

(3) Vibration API - 
http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-vibration-20140619/

]]

Received on Thursday, 26 June 2014 17:06:39 UTC