Re: WS Privacy [Was RE: Status of D-AG006]

Hi Joe.

* Joseph Hui <jhui@digisle.net> [2002-03-20 10:33-0800]
[..]
> On the new goal you're proposing -- protecting comsumers' private data
> from exploitation, I tend to think legislative bodies (instead of technological
> standard bodies) can be much much more effective in privacy areas.
> E.g. I don't know of any effective technical mechanism that can prevent
> a merchant from whom a consumer has purchased goods from using the
> consumer's shipping address for promotional mails.  But if the laws 
> says the merchant must provide a checkbox for consumers to
> exclude themselves from potential spams, then the problem (which is 
> only one of many privacy problems) is pretty solved, as it's technologically
> trivial to add such anti-spam feature (i.e. stopping spams at their sources).

Privacy can be protected by, for example:
- minimalizing the amount of data collected to what is necessary only.
- limit the period such data is held.

I don't think we can prevent data collection, but we can have services
advertize what they are doing, e.g. by using P3P, which was developed
at W3C[1], and plan for such things in the architecture.

> I'd also suggest that as we're starting to deliberate Privacy, we need to
> *define* (de Javu?) what Privacy means in the WSAWG context,
> so we know what we're getting ourselves into.

Even though I have been the one advocating for privacy, I am no
privacy expert and am copying Rigo Wenning on this in case he wants to
add something.

To me, privacy in the Web services architecture context is about
collection of data by service providers about the service consumers;
the tricky part is that there could be several parties involved for
providing a complex service, which could each have different policies.

The data could be tied to your name, address, or maybe simply a user
identifier, for marketing purposes or maybe just for statistical
analyses, it could be shared among providers or kept to one provider,
etc.

Regards,

Hugo

  1. http://www.w3.org/P3P/
-- 
Hugo Haas - W3C
mailto:hugo@w3.org - http://www.w3.org/People/Hugo/ - tel:+1-617-452-2092

Received on Wednesday, 20 March 2002 14:07:04 UTC