Privacy remains one of the main activities of the Consortium in the area of social responsibility. Privacy has many different aspects in W3C:
At least since Alan Westin wrote his famous books Privacy and Freedom
(1967)
and Databanks in a Free Society (1972)
, Privacy has been a
sustained challenge for computer science. Computing provides powerful tools
that can be used for the good and for the bad of humankind. W3C has started
work on Privacy with P3P and has continued
to explore the Privacy challenges since then. The current highlight is the work
on Do Not Track.
There is no obvious end to the Privacy challenge on the Web. Nearly 10 Years
after the completion of the work on P3P, much of the research in the area of
privacy, accountability and data handling is still heavily influenced by the P3P 1.0 Recommendation and the P3P 1.1 Working Group Note.
The very successful PrimeLife project allowed to explore new technologies like anonymous credentials, new policy languages and how to integrate the value of privacy into Specifications. With the Project's support, we were able to organize many interesting workshops:
It can be concluded that people need a venue for general privacy discussions related to the Web. All attempts to limit the discussion to a specific policy language or a very narrowly focused interest were rather detrimental to the overall quality of discussion and the success of the venue. This is now addressed by the Privacy Interest Group that runs the public-privacy mailing-list.
Political movements in the United States towards greater attention for
privacy have resulted in significant public discussion of Web tracking
techniques and possible countermeasures. Fortunately and as a result of its
strategic planning exercise for 2011, W3C had already decided to strengthen its
focus on privacy and had funds left out of the Primelife Research project.
Feedback was given to inquiries of the US government. High attention was given
to the Do Not Track
header initially promoted by CDT and implemented for
the first time by Mozilla. After the Microsoft Web
Tracking Protection Member Submission, W3C Staff held a successful Workshop on Web Tracking and User
Privacy at Princeton University on 28-29 April 2011 that led to the
creation of the W3C Tracking Protection WG that is now scheduled to produce the
Tracking
Preference Expression Specification to define the header & protocol and
theSpecification
on Tracking Compliance and Scope to define the meaning of this header.
Continued coordination with US and EU authorities on how to fit Do Not
Track
help make this technology a great enabler in eCommerce. Additionally,
the new Privacy Interest Group is now up and running.
The P3P Specification Working Group delivered multiple important milestones for the Web. The most important documents are listed here:
We hope that the Tracking Protection Working Group will deliver Last Call
Drafts on Do Not Track
by June. The Privacy Activity has also a
horizontal dimension that will be managed by the Privacy Interest Group that
coordinates over the public-privacy mailing-list.
| Group | Chair | Team Contact | Charter |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tracking Protection Working Group (participants) | Aleecia M. McDonald, Matthias Schunter | Nick Doty | Chartered until 31 January 2013 |
| Privacy Interest Group | Christine Runnegar, Tara Whalen | Nick Doty | Chartered until 15 August 2013 |
This Activity Statement was prepared for TPAC 2012 per section 5 of the W3C Process Document. Generated from group data.
Rigo Wenning, Privacy Activity Lead$Id: Activity.html,v 1.277 2012/10/19 17:33:28 sysbot Exp $
