Re: explicit-explicit exception pairs

On Apr 25, 2012, at 8:21 AM, Ian Fette (イアンフェッティ) wrote:

> Also, I don't think we should just punt something by saying "It's a UI issue." The spec has implications on UI that should not be ignored. explicit/explicit means we have to come up with UI to support this, where so far we have failed, it means sites now have to worry about corner cases they didn't before, etc. 

I agree with Rigo that this is a UI issue in the sense that user agent developers are completely free to decide whether or not to create what kind of UI they want. (We were able to discuss this confusion in DC, but only briefly, so I'll try to recap.) If Google Chrome decides that its users never want or need to see a list of domains, even when a site requests exceptions for a specific list, Chrome need not present any such UI; the browser can just display whatever UI the Chrome team creates for a site-wide exception and the team doesn't have to come up with any other UI. The browser also may choose not to store the list version of the permissions but just store a site-wide permission, or not to store the permission at all, the spec explicitly leaves all of these choices up to the user agent implementation. (Section 6.5 lists several other UI decisions that are also completely up to the user agent developer.) I expect user agent UIs to vary -- some browsers will use a simple built-in UI to avoid burdening their users; a developer of plugins for particularly privacy-conscious users might build a more complex configuration panel. Vive la différence.

What are the corner cases that sites have to worry about that they didn't before? In the current self-regulatory opt-out cookie system the publishing site never gets an indication of whether one of its advertisers received an opt-out signal (unless it communicates on the server side) and the site may have a mix of advertisers that received opt-out cookies or not. Sites that only wish to ask for site-wide exceptions can always call requestSiteSpecificTrackingException with the "*" parameter; that some unrelated sites specify a list of origins in the parameter need not affect them. Of course, even sites that always use "*" may still receive visitors where some of their parties receive DNT:0 and others receive DNT:1, but that situation will exist whether the JavaScript API takes a list parameter or not.

Hope this helps,
Nick

Received on Monday, 30 April 2012 07:24:08 UTC