Re: open letter on P3P

Hello Jason,

Thanks for taking the time to detail your objections to the P3P
specification.  I appreciate that you wanted to run the draft by Lorrie and
others in advance but am happy that you've made it public now, since the
conversation seems better suited to an open dialogue.  I'm sure that
members of the P3P working group will have responses on
www-p3p-public-comments@w3.org.  In the mean time,  there are two issues
that you raised that I'd like to follow up on. 

1. On developing services to support anonymous communication: Your letter
suggests that W3C should be putting energy into developing specs to enable
more anonymous communication.  I believe that anonymity is tremendously
important, see
http://develop.lcs.mit.edu/anniv/speakers/presentation?id=041399-15 for
example, and would like to hear your thoughts on what W3C or other bodies
could do to advance this goal.

2. Your letter encouraged me to look more closely at your Junkbuster
service.  Being a lawyer who reads the fine print, I noticed that you ask
users to grant your company a copyright license in their personal
information. (Hat's off to your site design which encourages users to read
this provision.) What I found there raises two questions:

a. Is your business selling users' privacy declarations going well? Are
direct marketers willing to pay for these? If so, how much? This seems like
tremendously useful information for all of us who are trying to develop
means for better privacy protection and understand whether or not there is
a market for personal information that individuals can take advantage of.
(I, personally, am not a fan of this sort of commoditization of personal
information, but your service seems like an interesting test of that issue
nonetheless.)

b. Have you looked into the question whether this sort of information
(name, address, marketing preferences) is actually copyrightable under
Feist (the US Supreme Court decision declaring that material in telephone
white pages are not copyrightable)? This also seems quite important in
understanding the dynamics of the market in personal information that you
want to create.

I look forward to your response.

Danny
 
At 08:56 AM 9/9/99 -0400, Jason Catlett wrote:
>Danny,
>
>I'll soon be publishing an open letter critiquing P3P.  The prompt for
>this was the need to write another letter criticizing the XML standard
>RosettaNet, in which I had to explain why the P3P was not a solution
>to my privacy objections. Rather than taking an oblique shot at P3P,
>I thought it better to confront the issue directly and separately.
>
>Drafts of both letters may be found in
>	http://www.junkbusters.com/nr/rosetta.txt
>
>I would greatly value your comments. The draft has already
>benefited from the comments of Joseph Reagle and Lorrie Faith Cranor.
>
>For now the draft should be considered confidental; I will mail
>you when it is final and has been released.
>
>If you have any questions, feel free to email or call me on 908 512 4608.
>
>best
>
>Jason
> 
~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~
Daniel J. Weitzner                                       +1.617.253.8036(v)
Technology and Society Domain Leader        +1.617.258.5999(f)
World Wide Web Consortium                        http://www.w3.org/ 
MIT/LCS

Received on Wednesday, 15 September 1999 12:35:35 UTC