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Improve the same-site recognition section.
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Using martinthomson's comments.
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jyasskin committed Jan 13, 2020
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Showing 1 changed file with 13 additions and 4 deletions.
17 changes: 13 additions & 4 deletions index.bs
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Expand Up @@ -198,9 +198,18 @@ specifications to defend against, described in subsections here:

Contributes to [=surveillance=], [=correlation=], and [=identification=].

This occurs if a site can determine with high probability that a visit to that
site is coming from the same user as another earlier visit to the same site, and
the user expects not to be associated.
Users of most instantiations of the web platform expect that if they visit a
site on one day, and then visit again the next day, the site will be able to
recognize that they're the same user. This allows sites to save the user's
preferences, shopping carts, etc. The web platform offers many mechanisms that
are either intended to accomplish this recognition or that can be trivially used
for it, including [[RFC6265|cookies]], {{WindowLocalStorage/localStorage}},
{{WindowOrWorkerGlobalScope/indexedDB}}, {{CacheStorage}}, and other forms of
storage.

A privacy harm only occurs if the user expects not to be associated between two
visits, but the site can still determine with high probability that the two
visits came from the same user.

A user's expectation that their two visits won't be associated might come from:

Expand All @@ -222,7 +231,7 @@ that are consistent between the two visits and probabilistically unique to the
user.

The attributes can be exposed as information about the user's device that is
otherwise benign (vs [[#hl-sensitive-information]]). For example:
otherwise benign (as opposed to [[#hl-sensitive-information]]). For example:

* What hardware is connected to the user's device? A game controller? An
assistive device?
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