ACTION-366: Draft text on another non-compliant/ignoring the expressed preference

Hi

This amplifies on what I suggested at  the end of last year in <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-tracking/2012Dec/0119.html>

Goal: as Shane said, it's necessary that IF a site is not listening to a user, THEN the site provides transparency and the user can be informed


I suggest that we add the following.

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Under some circumstances, a site may find itself unwilling or unable to respect a user's preference as expressed in the DNT header.  For example, a site may be under a court order to collect detailed information on all transactions within a certain IP address range.  Under these circumstances, the site MUST provide a tracking status value (in the well-known resource and/or response header) of 'L' (not Listening).

When the tracking status value value is 'L', the site MUST provide a 'notlistening' member of the tracking status resource, whose value is a URL that addresses a web page that provides the reason why the site is not listening to the expressed preference. When the tracking status value is not 'L', the 'notlistening' member MAY still be present but is irrelevant.

The conformance of the not-listening response is indeterminate, depending on the reason.

* * * * *

further discussion

Note that if the site is not listening to users selectively (e.g. based on their IP address or user-agent choice), then it will have to compute the tracking status value dynamically.  The 'notlistening' member might still be static, however (if there is only one possible reason why the site would not listen).

David Singer
Multimedia and Software Standards, Apple Inc.

Received on Thursday, 28 February 2013 20:08:13 UTC