Re: action-317, discussion of the service-provider flag and the same-party resource

On Jan 22, 2013, at 3:22 AM, Roy T. Fielding <fielding@gbiv.com> wrote:

[...]
> The only possible reason to use a flag to indicate that a service provider
> is involved in the provision of services is to perform some form of
> automated discrimination against service providers. 
[...]

We continue to have this discussion. There is utterly nothing new here. I just want to note that I continue to disagree. 

Another very valuable use is to provide transparency to users. Service providers ARE NOT the same thing as first parties. Taking away the users' ready ability to have transparency into where data flows is a poor decision (given the somewhat twisted world we are in where DNT does not actually allow users to stop data collection in the first place.) At the very least, DNT should allow users to see what the heck is going on and visualize data flows. 

Your (Roy) assertion at this point in the discussion is usually that no browsers have promised to implement such a feature. The response back from Mozilla engineers is that they would like to enable add-ons to be able to provide this functionality. I think this is entirely reasonable. 

With no browsers promising to do anything like automated discrimination against service providers, I do not see how lack of implementation is actually a strong argument here. On the contrary, I would expect to see add-ons use this data for visualization. 

	Aleecia