PING – informal chairs’ summary – 1 December 2016

PING – informal chairs’ summary –  1 December 2016

Thanks very much to Nick Doty for acting as scribe.

Our next call will be 19 January 2017 at the usual time.

* Requests for reviews:
A reminder that there are three requests for privacy reviews:
- Screen Orientation API [1], due 12 February 2017
- IndexedDB API specification [2], due 8 January 2017
- Web Performance [3], deadline TBD

Group discussion focused on how we can more effectively manage the privacy
review process to handle the volume of requests. Suggestions included
deploying self-review guidelines, with a followup to delve more deeply into
specific technical privacy issue for that specification, in discussion with
author(s). There was also a recommendation to make better use of Github as
a means for managing outstanding issues and related discussion, which could
make the review process more visible and structured.

* User Controls in Web Browsers [4]
Mark Nottingham shared this document as an evolution from previous
conversations with PING, which is an expansion of preliminary work on
private browsing modes. This document generalizes the discussion into types
of controls users may wish to deploy for managing their web data (i.e.,
site, local, and network data controls). Feedback is encouraged; this could
be adopted as a PING note for ongoing work.

* Mitigating Browser Fingerprinting in Web Specifications [5]
Work continues on finalizing this document, with particular focus on how to
make it more actionable for people writing browser specifications. Nick
Doty met with Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for their input about
fingerprinting issues. EFF suggestions were that it would help to
prioritize how issues were fixed (e.g., implementation versus specification
phase); that making fingerprinting detectable is important; that
consideration of UI/UX issues is key and could require specific attention;
and that we may need some coordination of fingerprinting efforts across
network bodies and layers (e.g., IETF/IAB).

Link to the minutes: https://www.w3.org/2016/12/01-privacy-minutes.html

Christine and Tara

[1] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-privacy/2016OctDec/0030.html
[2] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-privacy/2016OctDec/0031.html
[3] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-privacy/2016OctDec/0035.html
[4] https://gist.github.com/mnot/96440a5ca74fcf328d23
[5] https://github.com/w3c/fingerprinting-guidance