w3c / w3c/webcodecs

Suggestions on improvements for the privacy considerations section

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editorial privacy-needs-resolution
Dominant language
HTML
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Forks
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

  • A line “Underlying codecs are often implemented entirely in software” seems misleading given our findings.
  • It’s unclear to me how a privacy budget would be implemented without impacting web compatibility.
  • In the media capabilities draft they mention how a user agent would provide a subset of features that were common across devices to reduce entropy. This draft should mention the same and it’s not clear where this would go due to the configurations being part of other specifications linked in the codec registry.
  • The Media Capture specification is much clearer about the ability to fingerprint this draft should have all the same pieces.
    • Add sections like this spec to make it easier to read individual topics.
  • No mention of codec output being uniquely identifying.
    • It’s unclear if the output fingerprinting technique is different to the Media Capture specification but as support for more codec capabilities and input types increase (MediaCapture only supports streams) prevention of this using applying noise will become more difficult.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with the privacy considerations section and compare its coverage with the linked Media Capabilities and Media Capture privacy sections. Determine how the requested codec, configuration, privacy-budget, and output-fingerprinting topics should be addressed; done means the section clearly covers the concerns raised in this issue.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
html
Domain
documentation, security
Issue type
Documentation
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
22/100

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