Proposed text on ACTION-196: Draft text on whether url shorteners are first or third parties?

Following up on overdue ACTION-196, I propose to add the following 
additional use cases to whatever the eventual text is on First and Third 
Parties.  For the moment, I am assuming the first alternative currently 
in the admittedly outdated Compliance Spec which already has four common 
use cases.

Additional entries under 3.3.1.2.1.1 Common Examples and Use Cases

5. A user visits Example Social and sees the language: "Check out this 
Example News article on cooking: sho.rt/1234".  The user clicks the link 
which directs the user to a page operated by the company Example Sho.rt 
which then redirects the user to a page operated by Example News.   
Example Social and Example News and first parties, and Example Sho.rt is 
a third party.
6. A user visits Example Social and sees a hyperlink reading: "Check out 
this Example News article on cooking."  A user clicks the link which 
points to framing.com/news1234.  This page loads nothing but a frame 
which contains the cooking article from Example News, but all links are 
rewritten to pass through framing.com which is operated by Example 
Framing.  Example Social and Example News are first parties and Example 
Framing is a third party.

I would also propose to add the following sentence (somewhere) to the 
explanatory text which would precede the use cases:

In some cases, web requests are redirected through intermediary domains, 
such as url shorteners or framing pages, before eventually delivering 
the content that the user was attempting to access.  The operators of 
these intermediary domains are third parties, unless they are a common 
party to the operator of either the referring page or the eventual 
landing page.

-- 
Justin Brookman
Director, Consumer Privacy
Center for Democracy&  Technology
1634 I Street NW, Suite 1100
Washington, DC 20006
tel 202.407.8812
fax 202.637.0969
justin@cdt.org
http://www.cdt.org
@CenDemTech
@JustinBrookman

Received on Wednesday, 6 June 2012 16:03:38 UTC