Report from the Internet Privacy Workshop

On December 8-9, 2010, the IAB co-hosted an Internet privacy workshop with the W3C, ISOC, and MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The workshop revealed some of the fundamental challenges in designing, deploying, and analyzing privacy-protective Internet protocols and systems. Although workshop participants and the community as a whole are still far from understanding how best to systematically address privacy within Internet standards development, workshop participants identified a number of potential next steps. For the IETF, these included the creation of a privacy directorate to review Internet drafts, further work on documenting privacy considerations for protocol developers, and a number of exploratory efforts concerning fingerprinting and anonymized routing. Potential action items for the W3C included investigating the formation of a privacy interest group and formulating guidance about fingerprinting, referrer headers, data minimization in APIs, usability, and general considerations for non- browser-based protocols. Note that this document is a report on the proceedings of the workshop. The views and positions documented in this report are those of the workshop participants and do not necessarily reflect IAB views and positions.