The following common questions have been asked during briefing sessions.
Most of the questions relate to the likely use of the proposal. As such the answers are those that are considered likely uses of the technical change. There are likely many other innovations and alternative approaches that will emerge in practice. The answers should be considered for guidance and inspiration.
The questions and answers are divided between those that are general, artificial intelligence, advertising, and web browser specific.
The answer will be a matter for individual participants. However if past precedent is a guide then trade bodies will likely seek to create terms documents for use in data labels for common use cases.
Where data protection is the concern then lawyers and Data Protection Officers will be involved.
When copyright protected content is licensed commercial professionals and IP lawyers will likely create documents. Importantly engineers will get out of the way.
This will create competition among data label documents and should be considered a good outcome. For example; some documents might contain provisions that require attestation of the recipients computer code and platform, whilst another document might not. Much like open source licenses, it will be for individual organizations to decide which data label documents to work with.
Existing contracts can be modified to reference data label documents. When common clauses in contracts are sufficiently defined in data label documents the complexity of contract administration will likely reduce.
Just like in other industries there are likely to be different bodies with different considerations reviewing data labels. Civil society organizations might review common data labels and score them by different criteria. Web browser vendors might add an icon to the address bar of the web browser that enables users to choose a data label rating service and display the aggregate score associated with all data labels used to display a web page. Web browser vendors might then offer a setting that warns the user if the aggregate score falls outside a preset threshold.
Yes. Each TDL is a unique identifier. There will likely be TDL documents for specific use cases and data types. Each organization will decide which TDL to accept or reject and how to handle TDL values that they have not yet categorized. When their agents encounter these documents they will know how to respond based on these decisions.
A TDL document might combine via reference many other TDL values to avoid duplication.
The data label will typically consist of a single short URL and a short field indicator. As such it is no larger than any other type of meta data that accompanies digital activities including HTTP headers for support encodings, user agent information, or referrer information. Given the value data labels provide the authors consider the trade off well worth it.
Any additional reporting requirements will be a matter for individual data labels where it is expected that the market will gravitate towards trade offs that are justifiable and therefore become widely adopted. An advantage of data labels is that the market will decide for specific use cases based on the risk and value of the data.
The provision of a data label field and the requirement to retain the data label with the associated data is part of the proposal. Should a party be discovered to have breached the terms of the sender, or any sender upstream, then it will be a matter for the authors of the terms documents to decide how to sanction such breaches. Options might include reporting the breach publicly or ceasing to do business with the breaching party.
Yes. A new value is added to the robots.txt specification that indicates the terms under which the subsequent Allow lines apply.
Yes. Any HTML element can have a tdl attribute added to it indicating the terms associated with the content contained within the tag. Therefore a web page might contain content that is made available under different terms. For example; the summary might be available for any use, but the body of the page might require different terms.
Yes. Any data schema can be modified to support the data labels extension which is merely an array of TDL values provided as strings.
Data labels are component of payment models and measurement mechanisms.
The terms document might include reference to payment models which will be a matter for the parties to decide how to implement between themselves. Data labels will become an important component of content payment models. The sooner they are adopted the sooner those working on payment models will have a foundational component upon which to build.
The Content Security Policy (CSP) will advertise to the web browser the TDL documents that the domain operator is bound by. When data is retrieved from the web browser via cookies, or in the future other upgraded storage, then the CSP of the publisher, the TDL applied to the cookie when set, and any third-parties included on the page must all contain the same TDL value for the data to be retrieved. Thus publishers will be able to control which third-parties can access data.
Yes. Whilst there is free will in the world people will lie. However, the proposal when widely adopted will significantly increase the probability of bad actors being caught and bought to justice.
It is likely that those using data labels in commercial contracts will modify existing audit and reporting provisions to include TDL monitoring and ensure there is a requirement for any onward sharing of data to be bound by the same data label document.
All storage retrieval requests under the proposal will require the CSP to advertise support for the necessary TDL documents.
Therefore when a publishers or other party observes other parties interacting with the data they can ask their supply chain to report the parties that have downstream commercial contracts and the TDLs involved.
Where a party bound by the data label document has not complied with the provision to bind further parties to the same data label document this will become apparent. It will be for the individual parties involved to determine how to remedy the situation.