Re: Interim Meeting Agenda

At the beginning of this process, I had a couple of
Internet drafts, mentioned in the charter.

One described a method for including position information in an
HTTP transaction. This would typically involve sending position
information from a mobile device. The issues which are being discussed in
this group regarding privacy and security apply to this and
the draft is in abeyance (expired) pending a final privacy draft.

The other described a method for adding machine-readable location
data to legacy HTML documents. The intention was to provide
this location on static documents only. The privacy and security
implications of this are identical with those of someone placing their
address or phone number on the Web and someone else searching for it.
I believe that this is outside the charter of this group, and I
would like to get a statement to this effect so that I can progress
the draft.

It is, however, possible for this scheme to be (mis)used to
provide location information about a mobile device on a dynamic Web page.
I would propose that a revised draft explicitly discourage this usage
and that if necessary it be addressed in a later draft following
conclusion of the current work. I.e. I would
like to split the provision of dynamic location information about
people from the provision of static location information about
buildings etc.

HTTP draft
http://geotags.com/geo/draft-daviel-http-geo-header-03.html

HTML draft (revised since submission as RFC)
http://geotags.com/geo/draft-daviel-html-geo-tag-05.html

Andrew Daviel
Vancouver Webpages
Received on Tue Jun 4 04:15:26 2002