- From: Aleecia M. McDonald <aleecia@aleecia.com>
- Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 21:37:19 -0800
- To: Tracking Protection Working Group WG <public-tracking@w3.org>
On Dec 13, 2011, at 8:56 PM, Shane Wiley wrote: > Jonathan, > > If you feel by not adding user agent that this somehow creates a loop-hole that companies will attempt to thwart to avoid DNT, then I'm okay (reluctantly) putting user agent back in the language although this feels wasteful. Really quickly for those playing our home game: A user -> a human A user agent -> usually a web browser (ex: Internet Explorer) A user-agent string -> a text description a user agent can send about itself (ex: "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)") It is both possible to uniquely identify a user agent but not a user (example: fingerprinting a specific web browser, but no idea which household member is using it at a particular time) or to uniquely identify a user but not a user agent (example: a user logs in to a website over time from various computers in a public library, Starbucks, etc.). The people contributing to this thread seem to understand, but even with a little prior discussion there may be a few readers who did not. Aleecia
Received on Wednesday, 14 December 2011 05:37:44 UTC