After Three Years, First DNT Document Moves to Last Call
After three-plus years, featuring shuffled leadership, numerous defections and a significant change in tactics, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)-backed Do Not Track (DNT) working group moved its first document -- a tracking preference expression (TPE) -- to last call (http://bit.ly/1pu1At4). But the document, now open to a public comment period until June 18, has detractors. Two third-party advertising representatives objected to moving the TPE document to last call, arguing it lacked a way to validate a DNT signal, favored large companies and did little to enhance privacy. The group’s co-chairs determined the objections had either been previously addressed or were process-related and not part of the move to last call.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
"This is a significant milestone,” group co-Chairman Justin Brookman, director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Project on Consumer Privacy, told us. In a working group of more than 100 members, unanimity is not needed to progress, he said. “The biggest thing is that the meaning of the DNT signal is now defined,” said Brookman. Now the group can move on to deciding what “limited data collection you can do when you get a DNT request,” he said.
The DNT definition started with stating a meaning for “tracking” and “party” (CD Nov 21 p16), and ended with a definition for “context.” Along the way, group members continued to object to porting over definitions from an eventual compliance document, while others decried the vagueness of the definitions. “The issue continues to be how much of the compliance document is really now in the TPE,” said Brooks Dobbs, chief privacy officer of KBM Group, who did not object to the last-call move. “I think there is enormous pressure at W3C to move forward,” he said.
The TPE document defines tracking as contextual (http://bit.ly/1idGJFz). Tracking is collecting information about users across sites owned by different companies, Brookman told us. This “encourages the big to get bigger,” Alan Chapell, a lawyer whose Chapell & Associates advises third-party online advertisers, told us. Chapell dissented Wednesday to moving the TPE to last call (http://bit.ly/1ijiLnx). “What [the definition] does is create a perverse scenario where the intentions are to get as big as you can,” he told us. It will incentivize major Internet companies to buy up as many sites as possible so they can freely collect information across the sites, with users left in the dark, he said. “It doesn’t diminish the amounts of digital tracking that consumers are subjected to, it just dramatically shakes up who is conducting the tracking."
Third-party digital advertisers will be squeezed out as a result, Chapell said. “It opens the door for the Internet giants to further increase their market share and digital advertising space.” It’s telling that major companies like Apple and Yahoo have had such a major role in the TPE’s production, he said. Apple Embedded Media Director David Singer co-edited the TPE with Adobe Principal Scientist Roy Fielding. If Apple “can figure out a way to destroy the advertising network business forever, that’s great for them,” Chapell said.
"Big companies and small companies all have to play by the same rules,” Brookman told us in response to Chapell’s criticism. “Perhaps the specification favors companies with whom a customer has a relationship and knowingly provides data. I'm not sure that’s a bad thing.”
The Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) objected to last call, in a public email Wednesday from Senior Director-Technology Jack Hobaugh (http://bit.ly/1nstovX). The Digital Advertising Alliance split off months ago over frustration with the group’s lack of progress (CD Sept 18 p12), later launching its own DNT talks. Representatives were unavailable to comment Thursday on the W3C’s most recent draft. NAI’s Hobaugh cited an oft-repeated dissatisfaction with porting definitions from a compliance document to the TPE. “We need a minimum of definitions to do this,” Brookman said during Wednesday’s conference call.
The TPE document is also missing a necessary verification mechanism, Hobaugh said. “The technical approach of the TPE lacks a method by which the origin of the DNT signal can be validated to ensure that the signal was set as the result of an informed user choice,” he said in an email: Absent this, “the server cannot determine whether the DNT signal is a valid signal."
"We discussed this a few times, but did not come up with a technical solution,” Brookman said when the issue was raised in Wednesday’s meeting. “What do you expect here?” In a followup email (http://bit.ly/1nJXrN3), Brookman pointed to a February proposal from Yahoo Vice President-Privacy and Data Management Shane Wiley (http://bit.ly/1jHK24p). But the lack of a final solution shouldn’t hinder the document’s move to last call, Brookman said. “We recognized this was a key concern for many implementers and committed to keep trying to address this as part of the last-call process."
The TPE document now goes to the public. After three years of circular debate, public attention has wavered, Chapell cautioned. He told us he was unsure if there would even be substantive public feedback on the document. Group co-Chairman Matthias Schunter, Intel chief technologist, said during Wednesday’s call that public feedback would strengthen the document. “If in test cases many people would interpret our definitions in different ways than we had, in ways we did not expect, we need to make the spec better,” he said. “Without public feedback, the [working group] will not come up with better definitions.”