Consensus document from F2F: Consensus Action Summary

Dear Working Group:

The co-chairs and the W3C staff express their appreciation to everyone who worked so hard with us at the Face-to-Face in Sunnyvale.  Our thanks as well to David Singer and Apple for the hosting (including great cookies and cafeteria).

Attached and below please find the Consensus Action Summary from the meeting.

Best regards,

Peter

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Consensus Action Summary
At the close of the Face-to-Face Meeting on May 6-8, 2013 in Sunnyvale, the Tracking Protection Working Group has consensus that there was sufficient progress during the meeting to merit moving ahead with the Do Not Track standard, toward the July 2013 Last Call deadline.  As part of the continued work on the current TPE and TCS specifications, the following specific tasks have emerged from this Face-to-Face:
1. The group agrees to make the description of the audience measurement permitted use narrower and more precise. This includes normative and non-normative text. It also requires further investigation of the activities included in audience measurement and the concerns of privacy advocates. We agree to try to find audience measurement language that can substitute for the DAA's market research exception, in order to better align the DAA multisite principles with the DNT specification. We agree to assess both the merits and scope of this possible permitted use.
2. The initial version of the Tracking Protection specification will be defined with reference to user agents that 1) can access the general browsable Web; 2) have an interface that satisfies the requirements for the user to choose; and 3) can implement the TPE, including the Javascript APIs. Other user agents warrant further study. The scope is vendor-neutral, at the level of principles rather than specific technology details.
DNT should reflect explicit choice made by a user; there was commitment to explore anti-tampering measures to assure that the DNT state reflects the user’s choice.
There will be continued exploration of the explanatory language, to provide meaningful information to users, such as in the settings and help screens, and further information published jointly where it can belinked-to from user agents and Web sites.
3. There was agreement to examine a three-statede-identification process: red, yellow, and green states.  A new action item was created to come up with text on these three states with proportionality requirements and transparency into retention limits for both the red and yellow states. New homework assigned to examine DAA code definition of de-identification as normative language with supplemental non-normative language.
Retention periods for data collected for permitted uses remain an important issue to parties in the group.  There is agreementamong a broad set of participants that data retention for permitted uses should be proportionate andthat there should always be transparency about the dataretention periods.  Significant work remains to be done on whether to include any specific time limits and on specific transparency requirements.
4. There will be ongoing discussions of unique identifiers as a critical issue for advocates.  We are inviting proposals on ways to solve this issue going forward.












Professor Peter P. Swire
C. William O'Neill Professor of Law
    Ohio State University
240.994.4142
www.peterswire.net