Re: [TCS] comments on 17 Feb 2015 editors draft

As promised, I have distilled my comments down to three issues, one in the
Scope and two in the Definitions. The others were covered by Roy, and
reading it again I think the UID text is OK.

 

>1. Scope.

 

> This recommendation is intended for compliance with expressed user
preferences via user agents that (1) can access the general browsable Web;
(2) have a user interface that satisfies the requirements in  Determining
User Preference in the [TRACKING-DNT] specification; (3) and can implement
all of the [TRACKING-DNT] specification, including the mechanisms for
communicating a tracking status, and the user-granted exception mechanism.

 

The use of ‘and can’ implies the user-agents MUST implement the exception
API in order to comply, which is counter to the chairs’ decision on
issue-151 in which Option C calling for a MUST in the TPE was rejected. The
text here would allow servers to ignore DNT from user-agents that were
incapable of implementing the API, e.g. they did not support, or the user
had disabled, JavaScript execution.

 

(3) should be changed to remove “all of” and the last phrase “, and the
user-granted exception mechanism” should be removed.

 

 

> 2. Definitions

 

> 2.1 User

> A user is an individual human. When user agent software accesses online
resources, whether or not the user understands or has specific knowledge of
a particular request, that request is "made by the user."

 

If the user is unaware of a request they cannot be said to have initiated or
made it. The definition should just be the same as the one in the TPE (as
Roy said):

A user is a natural person who is making, or has made, use of the Web.

 

> 2.11 Tracking

>.

> Tracking data is any data that could be combined with other data to engage
in tracking a user across different contexts.

 

This definition is important because it is used in de-identification and
clarifying examples, so should not be removed. It is not simply "data
collected when tracking" because it is referring to data which can be linked
to a user agent instance so that further requests from it can be recognised
(in other contexts).

 

It could be better expressed. My suggestion is:

 

Tracking data is data collected during a network interaction that can be
used to recognise the same user during subsequent network interactions in
other contexts. 

 

 

Mike