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Terminology

Tim Cappalli edited this page Jan 11, 2022 · 5 revisions

Proposed terminology for the community group

Identifiers

  • Directed identifiers: A directed identifier is a user identifier that is unique for each site they’re visiting. A goal of anti-tracking policy is to promote user identifiers to become directed identifiers.

  • Global identifiers: A global identifier is a string that identifies a particular user independent of which site they’re visiting (e.g. email addresses and phone numbers). Users generally have relatively few global identifiers and can usually list and recognize them. A goal of anti-tracking policy is to prevent user identifiers from becoming global identifiers.

  • User identifiers: A user identifier is a pair of a site and a (potentially-large) integer allocated by that site that is used to identify a user on that site. A single user will generally have many user IDs that refer to them, and a single site may or may not know that multiple user identifiers refer to the same user.

Origin

An origin is defined as a combination of URI scheme, hostname, and port number.

Party

A party is defined by Tracking Preference Expression (DNT) as "a natural person, a legal entity, or a set of legal entities that share common owner(s), common controller(s), and a group identity that is easily discoverable by a user."

  • First Party: The first party for a user action is the party that controls the origin of the top-level browsing context under which the action happened. Intuitively, this is the owner of the domain in the browser’s URL bar. This differs from Mozilla’s definition in that Mozilla defines other parties as first parties if the user can easily discover which party it is and intends to interact with that party, for example to allow sign-in widgets to be first-party.
  • Third Party: A third party for a user action is any party that isn’t the first party or the user (the second party).

Sanctioned tracking

tracking based upon standards [that] allows researchers, advocates, and regulators to leverage their visibility and use tools to identify and evaluate the privacy-sensitive behavior of online tracking.

  • See Unsanctioned Web Tracking

  • Site: A site is a set of origins that are all same site with each other. Note that there are problems (Public Suffix List Problems) with using registrable domains as a logical boundary.

  • Unsanctioned tracking: tracking users outside the intended use of standards-defined tracking mechanisms

  • User: A user is a human or program that controls a user agent.

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