Re: First-Party sets and the potential application of the JournalList trust.txt specification

Hey Don,

On 2022-01-10 14:28, Don Marti wrote:
> Right now there is still an open topic of discussion about how 
> First-Party Sets will define common control for members of a set.
> 
> There is a workable definition of "controller" in GDPR: "natural or 
> legal person, public authority, agency or other body which, alone or 
> jointly with others, determines the purposes and means of the processing 
> of personal data." FPS is intended to be international, but this 
> definition is the best one I have found so far.

I'm not a lawyer, but I would like to caution against having any 
expectation that FPS and the notion of GDPR controller are aligned.

If using FPS for purely technical reasons inside of what is clearly a 
single service (basic-service.com and basic-service-usercontent.com), 
then that's likely fine. However, there is regulator guidance indicating 
that different services of the same company, even if on the same domain 
(and therefore even if they're in a FPS), are distinct data controllers 
and data sharing between them is subject to controller-to-controller 
expectations.

It's generally a violation of users' trust to share data between 
distinct services even if they are owned by the same company, shown with 
the same brand, etc. So in this at least the GDPR seems to be aligned 
with privacy principles. Folks might wish to be cautious before 
expecting FPS to hand out freebies in terms of data sharing, at least in 
that kind of jurisdiction.

> (For purposes of trust in journalism, data controller would probably be 
> necessary but not sufficient--the definition of control would have to 
> include content-related control.)

For entirely different reasons, I would be cautious about 
content-related control as well! There are media groups that own 
different titles with widely varying commitments to integrity and 
accountability.

-- 
Robin Berjon
VP Data Governance
The New York Times Company

Received on Thursday, 13 January 2022 14:51:34 UTC