Privacy Update
By Sam Weiler (W3C)
See also the slides.
Transcript
I'm delighted to offer you a very different report from what I might have given you four or five years ago.
We have so much privacy work happening in W3C right now, that we are trying to charter not one, but two new privacy-related Working Groups.
Unfortunately, it's not all roses.
We are running into problems with the chartering.
I'm gonna tell you about the work that's happening, then about the chartering, then about what you can do to help.
Most of you already know about the Privacy Interest Group, PING, which offers privacy review for specifications coming from other groups.
They are due for a recharter, which I'll talk more about in a moment.
But otherwise, they're doing their work, and I hope you're finding it useful.
Next on the list here, the TAG convened about two years ago a task force to write a Privacy Principles document, a statement, expanding on, expanding on the Ethical Web Principles document, which has a brief paragraph about privacy values.
That document is extensive, well-edited, and the task force welcomes your feedback.
One of the editors, Jeffrey Yasskin, will say more about that after the break in about an hour, and there's a breakout about it tomorrow afternoon at 2:30.
And then, we have two active Community Groups.
A Private Advertising Technology Community Group, the PAT CG, incubating standards to support advertising, while also acting in the interest of users by providing strong technical privacy assurances.
They met for the first time two years ago, at TPAC 2021.
And again, they have stuff that's ready to bring forward to a Working Group.
And we have a Privacy Community Group, Privacy CG, that was created about a year before, incubating other standards like the Storage Access API and the Login Status API. They met this morning, had interesting discussions about fingerprinting protections, bounce tracking protections, cookies, of course, partitioning and isolation.
There are breakouts on many of those tomorrow.
In fact, we have a full six-session track on privacy topics tomorrow.
And I'm really excited that both of these Community Groups have specifications that are ready to hand off to Working Groups.
The bad news is, we have not chartered those Working Groups yet.
Next slide.
Starting with PING, you may have noticed that both internationalization and accessibility have Working Groups doing horizontal reviews, not Interest Groups.
We are proposing to align that and have a Privacy Working Group as the successor to PING, which will take over the horizontal review functions and also handle standardization of technologies that have been incubated, typically, in the Privacy CG or WICG.
I heard a sound.
Are you all trying to interrupt me?
Great.
Oops.
No, boys.
Next slide.
Next slide, sorry.
It also proposed a Private Advertising Technology Community Group, taking on the advertising-related work items and co-existing with the CG.
For both of these, we are doing something a little different with the charter development.
We're trying to open up the discussion and shift the primary burden for finding consensus on contentious parts of the charters away from the team and into the community.
The idea is to reach rough consensus in a more open process, so by the time these charters reach the AC, they're less contentious.
There are fewer surprises.
And if there is contention, we know exactly what it is, and we know the community has worked through it about as well as can be done.
Unfortunately, that process has been painfully slow.
You may recall being asked to vote on a PAT Working Group charter last fall.
There were some formal objections.
It was sent back to the Community Group to resolve the issues.
The Community Group did extensive work.
Many of the people who objected showed up, and the Community Group reached consensus on a revised charter in May of this year.
Unfortunately, not everyone who objected last fall showed up to that process.
So while I can tell you how hard the Community Group worked and that the Community Group found consensus, I can't tell you if all the objectors are satisfied.
And then, after the Community Group's consensus call this May, some reviewers on the team raised further issues.
And that's further delayed our bringing this charter back to you.
Hopefully, they'll both get to you sometime soon.
Now, I told you we're using similar processes for the two.
There's another similarity, which is that the primary sticking point on both of them is the same.
Which is a conflict over how open-ended they should be, whether they should allow the Working Groups to adopt new in-scope work items on their own, or whether they need to come back through the chartering process every time they want to add even a single document.
In the case of the PAT Working Group, the Community Group believed in May that it had crafted a very narrow scope such that it was reasonable to let the Working Group adopt further documents within that scope without a recharter.
And given how slow this initial chartering has been, many people are understandably leery of signing up to repeat the process.
So while pushing charter development more into the community, as we're trying to do here, is a step in the right direction, that's been interacting badly with having these serialized review steps.
Next slide.
So, here's my call to action.
Please support this community-driven charter development process by looking at these charters now, before we send them for an AC vote.
If you have concerns, please raise, open an issue in their respective GitHub repositories.
Even better, a pull request.
If there's dissent, please show up for the group's discussion of it, so you can convince them of your point of view.
Give them a chance to convince you.
Because it's hard to reach consensus between groups of people who aren't talking to each other.
Again, the good news is that both of these Community Groups have great participation and energy.
The charter process is getting in the way of their moving their work into W3C Working Groups.
We need to fix that chartering process.
There's a breakout tomorrow on it.
Philippe told you about that earlier.
Because these problems are not unique to these two charters.
Other groups are having similar issues.
In addition to the breakout, ongoing discussion on chartering will likely happen in the Process CG, and I encourage you to follow the work there.
Thank you.
