RE: Redirect chains and DNT:0 / Exception:* (ACTION-146 re ISSUE-111)

Ian,

While I agree with the simplified approach (trust me -or- trust my site), I believe there are really 3 options when we look at the entire spectrum of user granted exceptions that some in the working group would like to employ:
1st Party                         3rd Party                 Outcome
coXYZ.com                  adABC.net            adABC.net has site-specific exception on coXYZ.xcom
coXYZ.com                  *                              All 3rd parties that operate with coXYZ.com will have an exception
*                                      adABC.net            adABC.net has a web-wide exception on any party’s site
While I don’t believe many publishers will ever implement option one (1st party + 3rd party expressed domain pair), I don’t believe it harms the standard to have this as an option.  Do you feel this adds too high a burden of complexity when compared to the possible options it may provide to those publishers that wish to only gain exceptions for known 3rd parties?

Thank you,
- Shane

From: Ian Fette (イアンフェッティ) [mailto:ifette@google.com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 21, 2012 5:29 AM
To: public-tracking@w3.org Group WG
Subject: Redirect chains and DNT:0 / Exception:* (ACTION-146 re ISSUE-111)

Upon reflection, this is probably just further discussion for ISSUE-111. I also can't seem to find the canonical text that ISSUE-111 is proposing. That said, my understanding of the proposal is essentially allowing for negotiation of (on this site, X can track me) where X is a single third party, list of third parties, or all third parties.

My main concern is that, as a website author, you may include ads from a given ad network (be that doubleclick, yieldmanager, adecn, or whatever) but have no idea what other third parties those ad networks syndicate to. You want higher quality ads on your site (which presumably translates to more revenue for the site), so you request an exception for the third party ad network you use directly. But, you have no idea, in the presence of syndication, what the final ad provider will be, so you have no way of requesting an exception.

It seems like the only meaningful thing is to request *, at which point I wonder why we're making this so complicated, rather than just two options -- "I request an exception for myself" vs "I request an exception for myself and third parties on my page."

-Ian