[webkit-dev] Proposal: add Privacy to WebKit Project Goals

[Maciej Stachowiak]

> On Feb 16, 2020, at 8:43 PM, Brent Fulgham <bfulgham at apple.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On Feb 16, 2020, at 12:39 PM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs at apple.com <mailto:mjs at apple.com>> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> There hasn’t been any feedback on this, so below is a proposed change (in PrettyPatch HTML format) to <https://webkit.org/project/ <https://webkit.org/project/>>.
>> 
>> In addition to adding Privacy as a goal, I also added Battery Life, and tweaked a few of the existing goals.
>> 
>> Thoughts?
>> 
>> 
>> project-new.html
>> 
>>  32<h4><a name="privacy"></a>Privacy</h4>
>>  33<p>Users want their privacy respected. We avoid directly violating the user's privacy, and strive to prevent websites and other parties from doing so.</p>
> 
> The term “directly violating” sounds a little soft. Do we not care about indirect privacy violations?

My intent was to express that the browser engine itself will not spy on you, in addition to our measures to prevent websites from doing so. I’m not sure what you think would count as indirectly violating the users privacy which would not be websites or other parties violating the user’s privacy, but I’ll try to reword it.

> 
> I don’t know the right wording to use, but I would like to say something along the lines of:
> 
> “Users want their privacy respected. We avoid violating the user’s privacy, and strive to prevent websites and other parties form doing so, too. We view the UserAgent’s primary responsibility to be protecting the interests of the user. We therefore do not support or intend to implement web standards that are at odds with these goals, or that create mechanisms to fingerprint or otherwise monitor user behavior.”

This seems unnecessarily combative. Also perhaps not entirely true. There’s lots of fingerprinting surface in the web platform, and we have not removed all of it.

I’ll make an attempt to write this more clearly.

 - Maciej

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