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

Whenever you interact with a server, there are privacy implications. 
What pages do you see?  What computer do you use?  Do you have 
open-source software installed?  What time of the night are you 
online?  Where from?

I don't think this is any worse, qualitatively;  nor does 'wanting an 
accessibility adaptation' really say very much about me.  I might be 
cooking and want audio description of video, or watching in a dorm 
with the sound muted and need captions, or, or...

I think we should do the analysis once we're done, but I don't think 
it should be a top concern as we develop our needs and solutions.

At 20:38  +0300 11/09/08, Henri Sivonen wrote:
>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/


-- 
David Singer
Apple/QuickTime

Received on Thursday, 11 September 2008 22:54:01 UTC