PING – informal chairs’ summary – 26 May 2016

PING – informal chairs’ summary –  26 May 2016

Thank you to Léonie Watson (Web Platform Working Group) and Eric Stephan
(Data on the Web Best Practices Working Group) for joining our call.

Our next call will be on 23 June 2016 at the usual time.

* Privacy review: HTML5.1
The HTML 5.1 specification [1] has moved to Candidate Recommendation (as of
21 June). Many of the changes have involved “clean up” rather than the
introduction of new features; nonetheless, the authors welcome a review for
any privacy concerns arising from this new version. The discussion
highlighted the utility of the Privacy Questionnaire for performing the
reviews; there was a call for more reviewers to take a look at the
document, and to bring any privacy issues that arise to PING for further
discussion.

* Privacy review: Data on the Web Best Practices
The Data on the Web Best Practices document [2] is close to being on the
Recommendation Track after quite a lot of activity in the WG. The goal of
this document is to provide guidance for publishing open data on the web:
ensuring it is discoverable, accessible, and protected as necessary. The WG
has been using the Privacy Questionnaire to review their Best Practices,
and created an initial draft of some of their thoughts. The WG note that
publishers may have different policies they need to apply, so it might not
be possible to craft a universal policy. Some privacy issues may be in the
hands of the publisher, but some rely on other standards, such as data
provenance (sharing how data originated and was disseminated). The
discussion highlighted the concerns of open data sharing and the potential
for unintended disclosures; it was suggested that the Open Data Policy
Guidelines might be a helpful reference. Also, given some of the
controversy over research performed using accessible yet sensitive data
(e.g., OkCupid), there may need to be further exploration of what is
considered “public” and what is “private.” The WG welcomes further comments
on any privacy-related issues that they may have missed in their
documentation.

* Privacy Questionnaire
Greg Norcie has been doing a great deal of work on this questionnaire [3];
PING
very much appreciates the work and would like to ensure it advances and is
shared with other groups. One issue that arose in discussion is whether the
questions could be more qualitative, so that respondents could provide more
thoughtful, detailed answers --  for example, explaining what type of
encryption was being used, not simply that *some* form of encryption is in
place. We will consider how this questionnaire might be turned into a Group
Note, and continue to make improvements to it.

Christine and Tara

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/html51/
[2] https://www.w3.org/2013/dwbp/wiki/Main_Page
[3] http://gregnorc.github.io/ping-privacy-questions/