RE: Privacy implications of automatic alternative selection (Re: Acessibility of <audio> and <video>)

+1 for Raman's comments.
V

-----Original Message-----
From: wai-xtech-request@w3.org [mailto:wai-xtech-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Henri Sivonen
Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2008 10:38 AM
To: HTML WG
Cc: W3C WAI-XTECH; Dave Singer
Subject: Privacy implications of automatic alternative selection (Re:
Acessibility of <audio> and <video>)


The privacy implications of using media queries came up on the telecon.
(The tacit assumption was that revealing that one has a given disability
is a privacy-sensitive matter.)

The choice of alternative media streams gives the content provider
information that correlates with the user's disabilities (unless all
alternatives were downloaded so that the content provider couldn't tell
with alternative was actually consumed).

If the user has to select from alternatives, the information about the
choice is leaked to the content provider at that point.

Media queries (or any other automatic selection mechanism), on the other
hand, would allow content providers to probe the user's
disability-correlated settings when the user visits a page without
taking specific further action on the page.

--
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Thursday, 11 September 2008 18:21:24 UTC