Hi all, My name is Gordon. My company develops websites and webapplications and infrastructure solutions in Germany. I am writing to get some feedback on a new microformat in planning. The aim of this microformat is to inform visitors of a website about the data collection/privacy policy of a website.
The background (and problem) for this microformat is a new law in Germany (the "Telemediengesetz"), which demands website owners to provide a policy about what data is collected about the user during his visit, by whom it is collected, for how long and why and how this data is used. This applies to personal data as well as connection data. The policy has to be presented before any data collection takes place. Since this is virtually impossible and heavily debated atm, I was looking for something to get close to this requirement. P3P policies might be one close solution, but its a hassle to implement and for small and medium sized businesses or even private website owners it is overkill. Forcing visitors to read any policies before they can access the content on site doesn't appear too user-friendly to me either. I need something simple, but effective. So I developed a small matrix to structure our policy information in compact form. This matrix is composed of three main elements "personal-data", "connection-data" and "cookie-tracking". For all those elements we get the attributes "collected" (indicating when), "duration" (indicating how long) and "access" (indicating who can access this data). All attributes can have several values: collected can be "always", "never", "opt-in" or "opt-out" and duration can be "once", "timed", "indefinite" and access can be "company", "isp" and "3rd party". Since this is just a request for comments I wont go into much more detail about what these values mean. I hope they are more or less self-explanatory anyway. I based them on the P3P specs loosely. This compact matrix could be presented to the user anywhere on the site to give him an idea about what to expect. He can then choose to read the entire policy or just surf on. My idea was to style this data into a graphic similar to the creative commons logos that tell about what a license allows and requires. Or maybe a browser plugin could read the format and popup when the data deviates from a user-specified setting (much like IE handles P3P policies). Well, so much for the basic concept. I'm looking forward to some constructive comments, whether this would be useful addition to the microformat family. Thanks. Cheers, Gordon -- Gordon Oheim Omnia Computing http://www.omnia-computing.de _______________________________________________ microformats-new mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-new
