Re: explicit-explicit exception pairs

I'm a bit perplexed as to the fact that you think a UI such as the one you
describe would actually be compliant. I thought the whole point of this
exercise was to allow the user to express a preference and translate that
as directly as possible to something that can be passed on to websites they
visit.

If you start picking and choosing from the API as if it were a buffet,
where does that leave you? You seem to imply it's fine for a UA to ignore
the explicit nature of a "first/third" exception and turn it into a
"first/*". Would it be equally fine then to just ignore the distinction
between "first/*" and "*/third" and just offer "site" exception regardless
of first/third issues? Or just to ignore exceptions all together and say
"Eeh, it's a UI issue, if the site grants an exception to anything we'll
just turn off DNT globally."

I think what is being proposed is unworkable and people are trying to use
the notion that it's "just a UI issue" to keep it in the spec. This is not
a good idea.

As for the new corner cases, I think many of us are expecting that there
will be new regulatory considerations (either under existing or future
regulatory regimes) that will involve DNT. Whenever there are new
considerations, there are new corner cases. For instance, cookie blocking
doesn't actually send any explicit signal to the server, nor does the
server have any clue as to what the heck is actually going on. Now we're
giving servers a clue, hence there's much more complex considerations.

-Ian

On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 12:24 AM, Nicholas Doty <npdoty@w3.org> wrote:

> 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
>
>