Privacy Principles

TAG Ethical Web Principles

2.5 Security and privacy are essential

When we add features to the web platform, we are making decisions that may change the ability of people to protect their personal data. This data includes their conversations, their financial transactions and how they live their lives. We will start by creating web technologies that create as few risks as possible, and will make sure people understand what risks they are taking when they use the web.

Goals

• Define privacy constraints for Web API designers.
• Help Web API reviewers check for privacy protections.
• Explain web-wide norms around privacy to site authors and regulators.
• Define the grounds on which we'll have future discussions about privacy.

Non-goal: override other ethical principles

Status

• Content complete
• Fixing wide review comments
• Copy-editing

  “Perfection is attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.”

• Handoff to the TAG this year
• W3C Statement

Structure

1. Background knowledge and beliefs
2. Concrete principles

Background beliefs

It wasn't always clear what should go here vs the principles section.

• Information flows need to be governed collectively.
• Support autonomy, with implications for consent.
• User agent duties.
• Apparent tradeoffs.

Principles *

* These highly compressed principles omit a lot of the document's nuance.