Privacy: It can be Global, Local & now Regional
by Peter
In yesterdays post Privacy: Do Not Track is Global – But can it ever be Local? I talked about Mozilla proposed new “Three state setting for “Do Not Track”
The current standard is either Allow Tracking or Do Not Track (binary). However this doesn’t satisfy all the use cases on the Web, nor fit well with laws in Europe. (The three-state setting for Do Not Track will consist of “no preference,” “do not track,” and “allow tracking.”).
I pointed out that this approach has a few potential pitfalls. So I offered some ideas that I think will work. So that you can see how this would work in the real world we added the changes to our Choice™ browser. Here’s a screen shot of what things look like using a “two state approach” but allowing for 3 states, in this case supporting regional privacy.
What the blue arrow is pointing to:
- Choice™ Verified – means that the server sends us a message that it’s honoring “Tracking Allowed”
- Tracking Allowed – means that we’ve set “Do Not Track” to off (we’re ok with you tracking us)
- Using Regional Privacy – means that the server is observing regional (e.g. US vs. EU) privacy laws
We’ve also adopted a “traffic light” metaphor – Green is good, Red is a warning. The user has the ability to disable these warnings via a checkbox.
So there you have it… a two state approach to the Do Not Track standard that allows for regional privacy laws to be observed.
