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

TV's approach was taken in the "IMS AccessForAll Meta-data 
Specification" (which is now an ISO standard ISO/IEC 24751) which let 
users specify what information they wanted without specifying any 
disability information (http://www.imsglobal.org/accessibility/).

Cheers,
Jan





Victor Tsaran wrote:
> +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/
> 
> 
> 
> 

-- 
Jan Richards, M.Sc.
User Interface Design Lead
Adaptive Technology Resource Centre (ATRC)
Faculty of Information (i-school)
University of Toronto

   Email: jan.richards@utoronto.ca
   Web:   http://jan.atrc.utoronto.ca
   Phone: 416-946-7060
   Fax:   416-971-2896

Received on Thursday, 11 September 2008 19:07:10 UTC