Nick Doty and Deirdre K. Mulligan, Standardizing Do Not Track: How Participants See the Process

Nick Doty and Deirdre K. Mulligan, Standardizing Do Not Track: How Participants See the Process

PLSC 2013

Workshop draft abstract:

Who really participates in the DNT standardization process? What kinds of positions are represented and what kinds of people are actively involved? How do those participants see the process? And what defines the process? (Beyond the World Wide Web Consortium’s Tracking Protection Working Group, discussions at various levels of formality take place in a number of distinct fora.) As part of a larger project exploring how engineers and standards development participants make decisions that affect privacy, we discussion initial results from interviews, textual analysis and participant observation.

While the concerns regarding procedural and substantive fairness we highlighted previously are themselves raised by participants and observers in the process, we also identify concerns around trust and communication. Finally, participants’ statements support a particular theory of values in design, with its own challenges and opportunities for privacy-by-design.