News/20190524

Personal overall lessons from the Sophia-Antipolis workshop of 2019.05.22-23

• Lawyers need to "steer" more technologists towards what is interesting for enforcement, which might be different from what is interesting from an engineering standpoint.
• Technologists have some difficulty in expressing what is being measured, some words actually seem to be missing.
  • The dichotomy first party/third party is losing some of the utility that it carried before: third-party analytics cookies are behaving like first party cookies. In reality, there are chains of calls from n to n+1.
  • If we want to be precise there are two technical levels to describe what is going on:
    • Layer 1 is on the graph of calls, and why those calls are made. Reasons can include:
      • fetching an image (like a tracking pixel);
      • fetching a script;
      • fetching some other type of content (which? <please fill!>);
      • redirects, of which there might be more than one kind;
      • others? <please fill!>
    • Layer 2 describes the packets of information circulating over this graph of calls. Tiny tidbits get exchanged:
      • through automatic sending of cookies when reaching out to the right domain;
      • as URL parameters in redirects
      • others? <please fill!>
• Lawyers and technologists are somewhat talking past each other, which is natural:
  • technologists have no settled vocabulary on their side to explain what is happening, with the granularity necessary for the lawyers to provide opinions
  • "it depends": vocabulary in law is by definition stretchable and/or carries heavy meaning.