[privacy-request] Issue: Web Neural Network API 2025-03-20 > 2025-06-20 (#156) marked as REVIEW REQUESTED

anssiko has just labeled an issue for https://github.com/w3cping/privacy-request as "REVIEW REQUESTED":

== Web Neural Network API 2025-03-20 > 2025-06-20 ==
- name of spec to be reviewed: Web Neural Network API
- URL of spec: https://www.w3.org/TR/webnn/

- What and when is your next expected transition? CRS planned in Q2 2025
- What has changed since any previous review? See Other comments.
- Does your document have an in-line Privacy Considerations section: https://www.w3.org/TR/webnn/#privacy
- Please point to the results of your own self-review: https://github.com/webmachinelearning/webnn/blob/main/security-privacy.md
- Where and how to file issues arising? https://github.com/webmachinelearning/webnn/issues
- Pointer to any explainer for the spec? https://github.com/webmachinelearning/webnn/blob/main/explainer.md

Other comments:

This API has received privacy review in [2021](https://github.com/w3cping/privacy-request/issues/27), [2022](https://github.com/w3cping/privacy-request/issues/96) and [2024](https://github.com/w3cping/privacy-request/issues/96#issuecomment-1911928615). The following are the key changes that the group believes are of interest to privacy reviewers since the previous review took place:

**New API to identify feature support per operator**. The [`opSupportLimits()`](https://www.w3.org/TR/webnn/#api-mlcontext-opsupportlimits) method allows developers to probe feature support per operator so that the optimal model architecture can be chosen ahead of time. With this information, the compatible model weights can be downloaded on the first attempt without costly trial and error (weights are typically large).  The information exposed by this API roughly corresponds to the underlying operating system and/or browser version, thus the group believe this feature does not add to the entropy significantly.

**Removal of the device type preference**. The device type indicated the application’s preference for the kind of device used for the compute: "cpu", "gpu", or "npu". This device type abstraction represented by `MLDeviceType` was removed (see [Device Selection Explainer](https://github.com/webmachinelearning/webnn/blob/main/device-selection-explainer.md)) to mitigate the issue reported in the [earlier privacy review](https://github.com/w3cping/privacy-request/issues/96#issuecomment-1182530960):

>Re: "If a future version of this specification introduces support for new a device type that can only support a subset of MLOperandTypes, that may introduce a new fingerprint", what mitigations does the WG envisage should this occur?

See https://github.com/w3cping/privacy-request/issues/156


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Received on Thursday, 20 March 2025 14:50:15 UTC