Simple Policy Negotiation for Location Disclosure

Relying on non-enforceable normative language to persuade Web sites to make their privacy practices clear has proven unsuccessful, and where privacy policies are present, they are notoriously unclear and unread. Various machine-readable techniques have been proposed to address this problem, but many have suffered from practical difficulties. We propose a simple standard for transmitting policy information just-intime and enabling simple negotiation between the site and the user agent. In particular, we detail how this could improve privacy of the W3C Geolocation API, but also suggest the possibility of extension to other application areas in need of privacy and policy negotiations.