[w3ctag/design-reviews] Referrer handling - default policy and capping (#538)

Saluton TAG!

I'm requesting a TAG review of current and proposed handling of referrers across various browsers, as being discussed on privacycg/proposals#13.

As summarized by @englehardt on the PrivacyCG thread, referrers leak users' browsing activity cross-site. Browsers have either already shipped, or are experimenting with a combination of:

- Applying a default policy of `strict-origin-when-cross-origin` - spec update in w3c/webappsec-referrer-policy#125
- Capping the referrer to either `strict-origin-when-cross-origin` or eTLD+1 (Firefox and Safari selectively apply capping to classified/tracker domains).

Does the TAG have an opinion on the present disparity among browsers, and appropriate long term handling of referrers? 

As @englehardt asks:

> At the very least it seems like we can align on defaulting to strict-origin-when-cross-origin (see also: w3c/webappsec-referrer-policy#125). But even this default can still be overwritten by motivated adversaries. This leads to the question of why only change the default, and not permanently trim cross-site referrers with no way to override?

CC: @domfarolino @johnwilander @erik-anderson @pes10k

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Received on Tuesday, 21 July 2020 15:35:44 UTC