Re: Security, Privacy and Accessibility use cases

Thank you, Josh, for your observations.

The following additional ideas on this subject were developed during the meeting, in your absence.


  1.  It is important to acknowledge the limited role of technological measures in ensuring privacy, and that much of the responsibility lies with regulatory arrangements rather than with the design of technologies.
  2.  However, there are cases in which it makes good sense to use technological measures to limit the disclosure of information which might reveal a person’s disability, so as to make the task of ascertaining these facts without the user’s consent more difficult for any party who seeks to do so.
  3.  The indicators that may be used to infer disability status (with a high degree of probability) may be different from indicators used to draw other inferences about the user. Hence, they should be identified and considered with a view to establishing appropriate technical controls, where appropriate. On this view, the distinctiveness of the disability-related issue consists in the types of information that are likely to be inadvertently revelatory.
There are additional issues that we didn’t discuss, including security more broadly, and disclosure of individual needs/preferences to applications for the purpose of enhancing accessibility.


From: Joshue O Connor <joconnor@w3.org>
Date: Thursday, February 27, 2020 at 06:56
To: RQTF <public-rqtf@w3.org>
Subject: Security, Privacy and Accessibility use cases
Hi all,

Our discussion in RQTF yesterday about security, privacy and
accessibility has produced some further thoughts.
Janina makes the point that many of the user needs and requirements for
security and privacy are generic, and broadly applicable for e'one. I
agree. There is a point of interest for us here in that there is
arguably an imperative when it comes to protecting the right of people
with disabilities online, or those who may be classed as vulnerable.

I think this is where we could lead the charge by further exploring the
potential impact of fingerprinting and how it relates to profiling
people with disabilities, if we can come up with ways of ensuring that
the integrity of the user is maintained throughout for people with
disabilities, my point is this may lead to interesting benefits for the
'ordinary' end user.

I think this is the use case (protecting the integrity of disability
related user data) - that could catch attention, headlines etc rather
like the traveling animal one in verifiable claims.

Janina also expressed the interesting nature of these technologies that
they are neither good or bad - it is how they are used that is
important. But to paraphrase some other clever guy, neither are they
neutral.

Thanks

Josh

--
Emerging Web Technology Specialist/Accessibility (WAI/W3C)

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