- From: Philippe Le Hégaret <plh@w3.org>
- Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2024 11:00:30 -0500
- To: public-review-comments@w3.org
From https://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/33280/PATWG-charter-2022/results Work on understanding and hopefully improving privacy on the web in the area of advertising is of vital importance to the Web, and W3C is well-placed to provide a venue for such work. However, the charter presented is inadequate to justify the creation of a group, so that approval would be harmful. Remediating this piecemeal seems inadequate - a new charter should be proposed for a new _ab initio_ review: 1. (Noted by a W3C Member and Mozilla [1]) Without identified chairs and Team Contact, and with the link to the single proposed deliverable being useless, there is insufficient justification present for a Working Group, and insufficient information is provided on which to base a review. 2. Given this group is working deep in one of the Web's fundamental economic bases, it seems **very** likely to produce significant controversy. - 6 participants from 2 entities is manifestly insufficient as a minimum participation requirement. - In order to propose new deliverables, the group should recharter, rather than simply add on whatever seems interesting to the participants. - Not planning to test the acceptability of its proposed deliverables with the community, through the Proposed Recommendation and Recommendation phases, is inappropriate in this context. (Related to, but goes further than, Mozilla's comments) - The default decision policy rests on trust in the chairs, an assumption that disagreements will be based on technical arguments and the range of possible resolutions will be broadly acceptable. It seems very possible or even likely that it will be insufficient to ensure trust in the decisions of this group (aggravated both by the commercially sensitive nature of the work and the fact that the individuals in whom we are expected to place our trust are not named). 3. (As noted by [W3C Member [3] and 51Degrees [2]) The charter is woefully deficient in its explanation of how the group will manange the tension between different business models. In particular, it does not address the difference between organisations who have something approximating a vertically integrated silo and those who seek to play a smaller role in a wider ecosystem. Given that the former typically has a deleterious effect on the ability for a multi-stakeholder process such as that which underpins the entirety of W3C's approach to the Web, by supporting something analogous to monopolistic or oligopolistic power over the effective state of the art, and given that these tensions are clearly important in the context of the Web today, the charter should provide more information on how these questions will be approached. On the other hand, I am not convinced by the argument that the problem is so deep that a "clean teams" approach is necessary. 5. (Noted by [W3C Member [3] and 51Degrees [2]) The charter fails to deal with most of the many cases where appropriate sharing of information across contexts (whether across sites, between consumer software and services, or otherwise) is actually beneficial to user privacy. Taking a limiting approach to the problem may make it easier to produce a deliverable, but also seems likely to increase the risk that the deliverable will not be a consensus product and will not actually solve important problems sufficiently well to justify the effort required of W3C and the community. [1] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-new-work/2022Sep/0006.html [2] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-review-comments/2024Jan/0002.html [3] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-review-comments/2024Jan/0001.html
Received on Wednesday, 10 January 2024 16:00:28 UTC