DNT Working Group Poll Backs Tech Focus, Disbandment
Participants in a Do Not Track working group, convened by the World Wide Web Consortium, overwhelmingly rejected the W3C’s current proposed plan, with many pushing to have the group disbanded or for it to focus on technical specifications over compliance issues, according to responses submitted to a poll that closed Wednesday (http://bit.ly/1bcePE0). The group’s chairs will meet Friday to discuss how the poll’s results will inform the group’s future direction, said co-Chair Justin Brookman, director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Project on Consumer Privacy. Respondents generally assumed the group would continue its discussions in some fashion regardless of the poll results.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
"It is well accepted that the technical specification (TPE) is in a better form to proceed to a Last Call draft through [working group] consensus than the compliance document,” wrote Jack Hobaugh, counsel and senior director of technology at the Network Advertising Initiative, in his comment. “Generally, technical issues are easier to reach consensus on than policy/compliance issues and W3C has experience setting technical standards.” Of the five options presented, two offered a heightened focus on technical specifications. Both received the most “yes” and “yes, and prefer” votes of any option. They were also the only two options to receive more affirmative than negative votes. Roughly 40 percent of the working group responded to the poll.
But several participants who voted for a technical focus also voted “no confidence” in the group overall. It’s better to stick around to simply maintain a multitude of opinions, wrote Brooks Dobbs, chief privacy officer at marketer KBM Group. Dobbs, like 17 of the 44 commenters, said he would prefer the group stop, but knowing it would likely continue, felt obliged to stay. His strategy “makes sense only to avoid the potential for a solution by attrition, whereby we have a specification which is not consensus but instead reflects only the opinion of the last man standing,” he wrote. “This outcome looks increasingly possible and would, in my opinion, lastingly tarnish the reputation of the W3C."
Three responders voted to opt out completely. Roy Fielding, senior principal scientist at Adobe and a lead author of the HTTP specifications, dismissed the usefulness of an isolated technical specification. “I am completely opposed to the W3C working on a mystery compliance spec after the protocol has been defined,” Fielding said. “The protocol must define its own semantics.” Center for Digital Democracy Executive Director Jeff Chester also bowed out.
New Do Not Track discussions launched Thursday could provide a venue for compliance, TechFreedom President Berin Szoka told us. The Digital Advertising Alliance, which is overseeing the new talks, is better positioned to produce compliance specifications since it comes from the advertising side, he said. This summer, DAA presented the W3C working group with its own compliance specification, which was rejected, he said. Szoka thinks it’s possible for W3C to wrap up its technical specifications and combine it with a compliance specification produced during DAA’s talks. It could happen before the end of the year, he said. DAA Managing Director Luigi Mastria left a pitch for the new round of talks in his poll response: “During more than two years since the W3C began its attempt at a dnt standard, the DAA has delivered real tools to millions of consumers” by educating consumers and making tracking information available to Internet users “within one-click of the ad,” he wrote.
Skeptical W3C working group participants should recall the ad industry’s failure to self-regulate initially led to a call for DNT standards, Brookman wrote in his comments. “DAA has made incremental (and important) improvements to provide consumers some degree of notice, control, and data minimization with regard to behavioral advertising,” he wrote. But the ad industry’s “failure to sufficiently self-regulate to provide a persistent, universal means to limit cross-site data collection was what led to the calls for a Do Not Track mechanism in the first place (by consumer groups in 2007, and ultimately by the Federal Trade Commission in 2010).” (cbennett@warren-news.com)