The W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) published a set of Ethical Web Principles on May 30, 2019 in order to provide an ethical framework when evaluating new standards. The TAG group doesn’t have any formal power in the W3C, but their recommendations are meant to help new emerging web standards see if there are any ethical blindspots in new and emerging web standards and protocols.
I had a chance to talk to one of the editors of these ethical web principles, Daniel Appelquist, who is the Lead Developer Advocate on the Samsung Internet Browser team. We talk about the evolution of these ethical web principles, and how it’s already been used to help flag that the WebXR specification needs to try to make the accessibility concerns for immersive tech more of a priority. There is a W3C Inclusive Design for Immersive Web standards workshop happening in Seattle on November 5th & 6th in order to see how the accessibility needs can be better addressed by the WebXR specification. Appelquist also said that the Samsung Internet Browser team was committed to delivering the WebXR spec by the second quarter of 2020 within the Samsung Internet Browser.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. So continuing on in my series on XR ethics and privacy, today's interview is with Tham Apiquist. He is on the Samsung internet browser team. He's the lead of the developer advocacy group, but he's also on the W3C technical architecture group, looking at different aspects of the ethical web principles. Back in May 30th of 2019, they put forth these ethical web principles. Incidentally, that was right around the time of augmented world. expo. And right when I was like giving my keynote about these different ethical and moral dilemmas of mixed reality, at the same time, they were coming up with these principles of the ethical web, just looking at all these different transgressions that had happened on the internet. And then from the W three C's perspective, the standards bodies coming up with like, what are the agreements that are coming across all of these different companies as they're implementing these specifications, Like, what are some ethical principles they can start to implement? And then as these new specifications come across, they're able to weigh against, these are the different principles that we want everybody to implement. But yet, how do we embed different aspects of ethics within the architecture of the web? So this is super exciting. I think I heard of this first in Selena Deckelman's talk, where I think she may have mentioned it. And then I was just, oh, my gosh, this is amazing that this thing exists. And then Dan is actually the guy who's on that committee. There's about 10 people on this technical architecture group that was helping to formulate these ethical web principles that are guiding the future specifications of whatever the W3C is implementing. They don't have any formal power, but it's just a way to kind of do a cross-reference to see, okay, did you really account for all these different principles when you're suggesting these new specifications? So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Dan happened on Tuesday, October 1st, 2019 at the ViewSource conference in Amsterdam, Netherlands. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:07.073] Dan Applequist: Hi, my name's Dan Applequist. I work for Samsung. I work for the Samsung Internet Browser team, where I lead the developer advocacy group. We are a browser. We're a Chromium-based browser. And the team that I lead does developer advocacy, so kind of working with developers, speaking at conferences and events, blogging, et cetera. And we also do standards work. So a lot of my team, including myself, are very active in W3C and in some cases some other places as well, working on new standards in particular. I co-chair a group called the Technical Architecture Group, which is a kind of a steering committee. It's one of the elected groups within W3C that acts as a review board or a technical review board for technical architecture issues of other groups' specifications. Also, Ada, my team, co-chairs the W3C Immersive Web Working Group. We've also been active in many workshops, and standards efforts, and burgeoning standards efforts in the past couple of years.
[00:03:15.535] Kent Bye: So is the idea that working groups will propose an idea, they have specific needs, so in the case of either WebXR, WebVR, and WebAR, they need these new devices that have new capabilities, they need to find the specification, they come up with their draft specification, and then they hand it over to the technical architecture group, and then you review it? Is that the kind of idea, and then you provide feedback?
[00:03:36.300] Dan Applequist: It's a little bit less formal than that. The tag group doesn't have formal power within the W3C. I mean, there's been a lot of discussions at ViewSource over the last two days about how standards groups work. And if you're not in that space, you might find your eyes glazing over about IPR and process and all that kind of thing. We encourage developers of specifications and new technologies that are bringing those technologies to the web to request a tag review. And in the process of that tag review, we take a look at some of the documents that we've written that are things like our API design guidelines and our security and privacy self-check. Or we encourage the spec writers to go through our security and privacy self-check and determine whether or not something is going to infringe a user's privacy or will add to the privacy problem on the web, for instance. And then in that process, we then review the specification and we get feedback back to the spec developers, which hopefully helps them develop something better and develop it more in line with the rest of the specs in W3C. And that's, in essence, the core mission of the tag is to protect web architecture. And architecture is really anything that happens at the boundaries between specifications, between technologies. It's where things touch together. And the shared designs are common designs that specification developers use when they're writing those specs or when they're designing those specifications. So yeah, so that's kind of the context of the tag.
[00:05:14.752] Kent Bye: Okay, yeah, that makes sense, because I went to the Architectural Association in London and talked about XR, but just architecture as a discipline is very interdisciplinary, trying to pull in all the different perspectives of psychology, anthropology, and the technical aspects, and so... A lot of engineers, they may be working on the specifications, but not be fully aware of the unintended consequences of some of those designs. And it sounds like the TAG group is really trying to take the 60,000-foot view to look at the larger context and unintended consequences of these low-level design decisions and then provide feedback to maybe have things in alignment there.
[00:05:52.506] Dan Applequist: Yeah, and we are a small group. We are only 10 people. By design within W3C process, we can only be that size. There are certain rules about the tag, like you can't have more than one member of the tag from a certain organization or company. And members of the tag are meant to be representing their own themselves, really, rather than their employer, and kind of bringing their views about what is best for the web to the front of our thinking. So, for instance, we have a member from Apple, we have a member from Google, myself from Samsung. We also have a number of invited expert kind of individual members who are not affiliated. And so it's a very varied group in that regard.
[00:06:38.012] Kent Bye: Well, here during your talk at Vue Source, you had mentioned that the WC3 tag group had put out a set of ethical web principles around privacy. And so maybe you could talk a bit about the evolution of this.
[00:06:50.725] Dan Applequist: So one of them is focusing on privacy, but the ethical web principles, the idea started last year. It was actually prompted by a conversation that I had with Tantek Celik from Mozilla at one of the W3C events that was held last year. Because I've been looking around and anybody in the industry cannot be unaware that there's been a renewed focus on ethics, ethics and technology these days. Ethics are extremely important in how we build systems, and especially on the web, there's always been a kind of culture of ethical design, ethical principles. The web itself is built on that foundation. The whole idea of building a system that is then released basically open source or royalty free so that anybody can build on top of it without having to pay royalties is inherently an ethical design choice. Then principles such as accessibility and internationalization were key to the development of the W3C and to the development of all specifications that went through W3C. A lot of people who have been in W3C for a long time We like to say things like, oh, accessibility is extremely important in our culture and internationalization is extremely important to our culture. But those things weren't really written down in one place, in a place that articulated a number of different ideals or the number of different ideals or values that the W3C holds. And more recently, we've been doing a lot in the tag with regard to security and privacy and really putting a focus on making sure that new specs that come through our process anyway are looked at with a privacy lens to understand what privacy infringing aspects they bring to the web and to try and minimize those aspects to get developers thinking about those aspects, right? Because And it's all really to the point of it all is to understand that the web is not simply a neutral technology platform that you can just build anything on top of. It should be weighted towards being for the benefit of society. So earlier this year, we started working on a short document which we could articulate in the tag about what we felt those principles were, some of those principles were. And we came up with 12. principles. Now, I can go through them right now if that's okay. So, I mean, we started off with there is one web, which is really about the primary issue here is thinking about how web technologies should not be built to enable or enforce regional boundaries. We should be thinking about the web as one cohesive worldwide web. The web should not cause harm to society, right? So web technology itself should not be causing harm to society. There's been a lot of talk recently about how social media and other kinds of things have maybe inherently causing harm or are being gamed by some parties to cause harm. There's been some talk at Vsource about that. That's something that we felt was pretty important to put down on paper, that it should be a benefit to society. The web must support healthy community and debate. So, for instance, while interaction is important and a key part of the web, it should also be possible on the web to protect yourself from bad actors. So that's part of the healthy community and debate part. The web is for all people. So again, this also brings in the internationalization aspect, right? We really thought that was an important part to put down on paper. Security and privacy are essential. Again, coming back to you must take into account the privacy infringing aspects of any specification that you're bringing to the web. the web must enable freedom of expression. So freedom of expression is really fundamental to why the web exists and how it was built. On the other hand, we wrote this particular text of the detail text to enforce the idea that while freedom of expression is fundamental, also that should not be construed or misconstrued to mean that any particular website can't block, for instance, hate speech or speech that is against their own rules or against social norms. Freedom of speech cannot be used as a stick to beat people up with or to have bad behavior. And we're seeing that a lot. So we wanted to make a statement about that. It must be possible for people to verify the information that they see. So when you're reading journalism, how can you drill down into the facts? This is all about maybe veracity of information. And there is some work going on in W3C right now around the Credible Web Initiative, which is actually baking provenance more into the fundamental architecture of the web. The web must enhance individuals' control and power, so the web is used more and more in more aspects of our daily lives than ever right now. You use the web to apply for government services, use the web for banking, use the web for communication. We use the web for all these aspects that are essential to our lives and the web must put the user in the control of those as opposed to the other way around. Web must be environmentally sustainable. So this is something that we've been working on, revising the text as well to make it clear that it's also about emissions. It's about how can we make sure that the web, including the data centers that are running all of this web infrastructure, are not contributing to the global warming, to climate change. The web is transparent. It's built on this view source principle. We saw a talk today demonstrating use of the dev tools. It's a really good example of how when you go into a web page, you should be able to determine what's going on. Also, as an extension developer, you should be able to mess around with what's going on inside of a web page. So if I want to build an extension that helps end users block ads, that's a fundamental aspect of putting the user in control and also the web being a transparent platform. Web is multi-browser, multi-device, and multi-OS. This was a fundamental one. And you really understand that the web derives its power from its multiple implementations. And we all know what happens, I think, when we have one dominant implementation that starts to drive the whole program of the web. It doesn't go well, specifically talking about the dominance of IE a while back.
[00:13:13.362] Kent Bye: especially around standards, right? Just kind of creating their own proprietary solution rather than open standards.
[00:13:18.964] Dan Applequist: Exactly. That's right. And that's why it's important for multiple parties to come to the table in a consensus-based way to build web standards. It doesn't mean that people can't innovate on their own space and create new things and develop new ideas. But in the end, for things to really become part of the web, They need to be implemented across different browsers, different OSs, and different devices. And if anything, that was reinforced by some of the information that we heard at ViewSource here from Kadir about the results of the MDN developer needs survey, which really made a point that the main developer pain point is interoperability and getting things to work across browsers. So it was one final ethical web principle, which is people should be able to render the content the way they want, which is also about accessibility and again about installation of browser extensions and that kind of thing. So, together, those are the kinds of, you know, we can't, since we don't have any formal power, we can't enforce that anybody take these ethical principles into account when they're building new web technologies. However, the tag, this is a finding, that's the kind of document that the tag issues sometimes. And we hope people pay attention to it. We have seen very good feedback. But it is also stuff that we take into account when we do a tag review. So if somebody comes to us with a new API, and that API is only implemented in one rendering engine, one thing we're going to ask is, are you talking to any other rendering engines? Are you talking to any other browsers about implementing this API? And this helps us to back up that question by saying, In our ethical principles, we talked about multi-browser, multi-OS. Is this something that you're looking to or that is being looked at by other browsers? Because that would help the story for that API. So those kinds of things.
[00:15:14.005] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's interesting just to hear that list because it is very aspirational in the sense that this is the world I want to live in, but yet I feel like we're a long way away from that and that you, within the W3C, you have the opportunity to set at the protocol layer any official standard that is going to be coming out of the W3Cs, at least trying to aim or strive towards these standards. But yet, once you ship the standards, it's kind of like the Wild West where people can kind of do whatever they want.
[00:15:41.396] Dan Applequist: So yeah, I mean, we cannot control how people build and design services, right? But what we can control is how the standards themselves are built, and what the API surface looks like of different things, and what the normative requirements for user agents are, for browsers are, when they actually implement a thing. So we can say, you must prompt the user for permission in order to use this API. So if somebody wants to know your location, to use an old example, you must prompt the user, you must ask them, you know, that's a kind of ethical choice that puts the browser in an intermediary position between the end user, the needs of the end user, and the needs of the app developer, the web app developer, right? And that is one of the differentiators for the web to begin with. So if we can design the specs and standards themselves in a way that way it's used towards ethical approaches and towards a more socially beneficial approach, then hopefully we can stave off the more unethical uses of the web.
[00:16:46.635] Kent Bye: Well, I see one of the big paradoxes with the immersive web and the future of all these spatial computing and immersive technologies is that we're going to be soon moving into a world with eye tracking data, galvanic skin response, biometric data, all this super intimate information that The existing models of consent are what is your birthday, and then you type it in. But when you start to have access to even your motion data, how you're moving your body around, your gait information, there's a lot of information that can be extracted from that. And so I think it's a little sensitive in a sense where you don't want, as a standards body, to come and say, you know, the privacy risks are way too huge. to then shut it down to not have any innovation. I mean, there's plenty of amazing applications that can happen here, but we're kind of entering into a, crossing the paragon into a completely new paradigm for spatial computing that's going to have so much more intimate information. And so for the W3C and as a standards body, looking at these technical architectures, like how do you start to handle this new paradigm shift?
[00:17:49.288] Dan Applequist: Well, for one thing, I think it's about including those anti-use cases, those abuse cases, in the initial thinking about the specification. So, in the case of the Immersive Web, it's about including the abuse cases that people might not want to think about, so that you can understand what the mitigations to those might be. So, taking a case-by-case basis, thinking about mitigation. The other thing that comes to mind, kind of related, is like accessibility. So accessibility within immersive environments. There's a workshop coming up in November which is focusing on this, but some of the tag feedback to the immersive group on their WebXR specification had to do with asking them to think more about accessibility use cases at the beginning, in the main document, so that they're thought of as a first-class requirements, rather than a kind of ancillary requirements. And again, that comes back to one of our ethical principles about the web is for all people. So we need to think about the needs of people who require assistive technology, or who may be low vision or blind or low hearing, you know, right at the beginning. And that was feedback that was well received by the WebXR group. So hopefully they're working on stuff and we're And we're going to have a workshop in November, as I said, which is chaired by Leone Watson, who's an amazing person in the W3C community. And I mean, there are other aspects of social danger or negative situations that you can be exposed to in a kind of immersive environment that We don't have to worry about in the regular web like harassment including physical harassment and that kind of thing where we've seen instances of that happening in immersive environments. So I think one of the other challenges for the immersive group to think about is how can they build mitigations against those abuse cases into the spec to begin with, so that there's a clear safety net for people when they're using the Immersive Web, that it feels more safe, maybe, than native immersive environments.
[00:19:54.683] Kent Bye: So for you, what are some of the either biggest open questions that you're trying to answer, or open problems you're trying to solve with the Tag Group?
[00:20:03.767] Dan Applequist: That's a really big open-ended question. I think the privacy issue in particular is very key. So how can we both not break the current ecosystem when it comes to the funding model? Because the current ecosystem is broken. It's dysfunctional. And I was just having a talk with somebody earlier about how I wouldn't personally surf the web or use the web without an ad blocker or tracking blocker on. So why should I expect anybody, any user, to use the web without a tracking blocker on? It shouldn't be a matter of us needing to educate users about the use of tracking blockers. That's a dysfunctional situation that we're in right now. So we need to think about a way for advertising ecosystems to exist that do not behave in this kind of surveillance capitalism way and also are still able to support the content that they need. And I think part of the answer to that question lies in standards and lies in how we how we evolve the set of current standards especially around persistent information and how information bleeds across security boundaries within the web architecture. So it makes it less possible, it mitigates against misuse and there's rampant misuse right now because those systems and technologies weren't designed to support the kind of global ubiquitous information system that we have now.
[00:21:32.288] Kent Bye: Well, the ad model seems to be the biggest blocker to this. And so I think about alternative models of people explicitly paying, subscription models, but then that could preference different people who already have access to that money. So you have to be wealthy enough to afford privacy. So do you feel like that there's going to need to be other aspects of either policy changes from each individual country or something that is coming in from government support for different countries. I mean, this is a global ecosystem. So how do you start to shift the dynamic when you're thinking about the whole context of the entire globe and to kind of wean us off of this surveillance capitalism model and find completely new models?
[00:22:17.113] Dan Applequist: That's a question that goes beyond the scope of my work in the tag, that's for sure. But I mean, personally, as an individual and as a kind of person in this industry, I see the rise of privacy-enabling technologies such as ad blockers, tracking blockers, that kind of thing. It should be a wake-up call to the ad tech industry that they need to behave in a more ethical way. We are seeing some bright spots like, for instance, the EFF Privacy Badger tool allow lists, certain ad tracking networks that behave in an ethical way or make an ethical promise about the storage and use of user data. So that could be one way forward. I think it's a false dichotomy to pit ads and tracking necessarily against user privacy. Currently, the majority of them are not built in a way that protects user privacy very well. So those need to be fixed. I think regulatory can definitely play a role and should definitely play a role I live in the UK which is in the GDPR regime currently and that kind of thing in the e-privacy directive that's coming out of the EU are positive in that regard maybe making people think more about the data they collect and how data is can be an asset but can also be a liability, especially misuse of data can really bring very large fines. So I think that's part of the point of that regulation, is to try and mitigate against rampant data collection and misuse, which is happening now. And I also think browsers need to do more in terms of turning on more draconian anti-tracking protections by default. So I'm hoping to see that happen as well.
[00:23:56.111] Kent Bye: Well, as your capacity of a Samsung employee working on Samsung Internet, I know that Samsung Internet was a pioneer of WebVR, shipping the first browser that actually implemented the WebVR spec. The platform primarily was on the Gear VR, Oculus Connect 6 just happened, where John Calamac very publicly gave a eulogy for the Gear VR, just in the sense of, in the future, the support is gonna, you know, we don't necessarily see existing support. I know you can't talk about existing product lines, but just in terms of the Samsung Internet, is the Samsung Internet committed to continuing to work on the future of the immersive web with WebXR?
[00:24:32.365] Dan Applequist: So my, as far as I know, our commitment remains to implementation of the WebXR spec, which we're looking to do by Q2 next year in Samsung Internet. And I don't know anything about the issue around the Gear VR. We are currently still doing a lot of work with the Gear VR browser and doing prototyping using Gear VR. So I don't know anything about it other than that, but I can tell you our commitment is still there definitely and hasn't changed.
[00:25:04.229] Kent Bye: Yeah. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of spatial computing in a future that is built around privacy and what it might be able to enable?
[00:25:16.835] Dan Applequist: I would like to see it enable more casual uses of augmented reality and mixed reality scenarios where you as a user become aware of the opportunity to participate in augmented or mixed reality Experiences in the process of going through your day in a way that helps you right not in a interruptive way there I think there have been many If you've watched any black mirrors, you know that there have been many visions of the future presented there and obviously in other places as well where the ubiquitous presence of augmented reality and mixed reality reality becomes a part of a dystopian nightmare and I think it is incumbent on anybody working in this space and definitely incumbent on manufacturers such as Samsung to watch all episodes of Black Mirror and to make sure that the future we are building is not that. but is rather built from a perspective of meeting real user needs and treating people with respect and putting people's dignity and people's control of situations at the heart of any technology and of any services that are built. So, ideally those types of interactions can help people and can create great, delightful, wonderful, magical user experiences as people go about their daily lives. and are not painting advertising onto every surface that they see, for instance, which would be a horrible nightmare. So that's kind of both my hope and a bit of a warning maybe to the entire industry that we need to think about those abuse cases, coming back to the ethical principles, we need to think about those abuse cases when we're designing specifications, we need to think about the abuse cases when we're designing services, and we need to build our services to specifically to thwart those abuse cases so that we're creating great experiences and we're not really creating a nightmare scenario.
[00:27:17.198] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the immersive community?
[00:27:23.923] Dan Applequist: No, I think I'm good. I mean, yeah, I have been really impressed by this community, by the diverse nature of this community, first of all. And I think that that's one of the strengths that it has, and I hope that it continues to grow in that way. I think the more diverse and inclusive the community of developers are, the more that we can achieve these goals that I just talked about before of making sure technology and the services that we build are meeting the needs of diverse communities of practice and marginalized people. And that's on a good track, I think, at this point.
[00:28:00.025] Kent Bye: Awesome. Great. Well, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Thank you. Thank you. So that was Dan Applequist. He's on the Samsung Browser Internet team as the lead developer advocacy group. And he's also on the technical architecture group and helps formulate these ethical web principles from the W3C. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, well, I loved these ethical web principles. In fact, I took a lot of these principles and used it as a bit of a baseline to try to look at, well, how do these apply to immersive technologies? I think these are a lot of really great starting points for these different principles and for their context, they're looking at for the communications technologies of these different protocols and trying to across all these different regional boundaries of the one open web. starting with the standards of HTML and all these other ways of rendering content through the web? And what are the different principles to be able to apply for people across regions and different levels of ability and all these other different ethical considerations? And so they had come together and actually wanted to formalize these as a process, because I think it was kind of informally done before. But now, anytime that anybody comes to them with a new specification, that's going to be recommended to go through the technical architecture group to look at these different ethical principles. And just as an example, it sounds like that the WebXR as a specification was like going through this list and the accessibility considerations weren't a first class citizen. It was almost like a secondary consideration, but they're like, actually, in order for we really push this forward, we really need to consider these different aspects of accessibility. And so in that spirit, they're actually going to be having this inclusive design for the immersive web standards. That's going to be happening in Seattle. on November 5th and 6th. And so if you happen to be in the area, I think it's open to the public and you can go and have these different discussions for how we're going to create these immersive technologies that are actually accessible. And so as you go through these different ethical web principles, there's some things like, you know, the people should be able to choose how they render the web content, however they want. And I think that gets into those different aspects of accessibility is that people have screen readers, you know, they may not have full sight or full hearing. And so there's ways in which that you can take the content from the web and to be able to remix it in order to allow people who may not have the full abilities to be able to specifically for them, be able to consume a lot of this information. So what's it mean to think about like the WebXR, especially when you start to have these things converted into WebGL, which is like this huge black box, how are we going to move forward into this future when you're essentially including things into this like binary code that doesn't necessarily still follow the view source principles when you actually implement it. So thinking about the 3D DOM and thinking about the new architectures of this immersive web, the accessibility principles actually could help start to think about these deeper architectural issues of like, okay, we can't just like create these black boxes and include things for people who have the full ability to perceive all this different content. There's a bit of an ethical and moral obligation to be able to render out that content so that it can be available for everybody independent of whatever abilities that they have. So that's just one example of how they're applying these different ethical web principles and how people that are starting to implement WebXR then start to take some of these things into consideration. Just as an aside, as we're on WebXR and Dan specifically is at Samsung, you know, at Oculus Connect 6, John Carmack essentially during his keynote said, let's have a eulogy for the Gear VR. That's in part because a couple of years ago, there was this forking of this relationship between Samsung and Oculus, where before the whole mobile strategy for Oculus was relying upon the Gear VR. to be able to take a Galaxy phone or a Note phone from Samsung and put it into the Gear VR mobile headset and to have these immersive experiences. But Oculus started to announce the Oculus Go and then Samsung started to announce that they're doing their own standalone. So you start to see the split in the relationship between Oculus and Samsung. especially when you look at the latest lines of the Samsung Galaxy phones, they don't actually support the Gear VR at all. But at the same time, they're still committing to start to launch the WebXR immersive web specifications in the Samsung Internet browser starting in the Q2 of 2020. Actually for Chrome, the main branch of a lot of the WebXR I think is coming in and release 79, which should be dropping at like the end of November, beginning of December. It's been a long, long journey. So we're going to start to see WebXR implementations. I expect that Mozilla is going to follow soon after that, but I'm excited to see some of these specifications start to actually get out there. But getting back to the main thrust of this conversation, which I really wanted to start to talk about some of these ethical web principles. So just to go through them again is that. There's one web, and so you don't want to have this balkanized web that is different depending on the different boundaries. You should be expected to be able to have one internet, one web that's out there. We already start to have that with the Chinese firewall and different aspects in which the web and the internet there doesn't necessarily get to us, or there's certain aspects of our internet that doesn't get into China. So that's an architectural consideration of trying to strive for one web. web should not cause harm to society. So just trying to mitigate the different harms to society, you know, undermining different aspects of democracy, or just trying to like, look at some of these unintended consequences that happen at the cultural sociological level and try to mitigate that to some way, the web should support healthy community and debate. So just finding ways that we don't spread misinformation or hate speech or dangerous speech and find ways of mitigating that. So finding ways to have the architecture to support healthy community and debate and then the web is for all people so different ways to internationalize things so to Have a language translation is a big part of what's the technical architectures for that security and privacy are essential so just trying to embed a lot of these best practices within the architecture of trying to sandbox and have different ways of mitigating the different tracking technologies and The web must enable freedom of expression. The web must make it possible for people to verify the information that they see. So potentially building in prominence within the web itself. The web must enhance individual's power and control. So really thinking about the autonomy of the individual and finding ways that we're not trying to take data from people and to use that to undermine them and to take away their control and power. And so what are the ways that you can leave that autonomy and sovereignty within the hands of the users? The web must be an environmental sustainable platform. So I think this is just gets into the larger ecosystem of like not creating stuff that's going to be harmful for too much energy consumption or things that are just ethically produced in a way that's in harmony with the ecosystem. The web is transparent. So this whole view source principle so that you can actually look at the code that is there. There's a certain level of transparency there. Sometimes, you know, when you start to do rendering and stuff that happens on the server level, you start to lose a little bit of that transparency in the algorithmic transparency, but at least there's this desire to have a certain amount of transparency on the web to see what's actually happening. So to be audited, but also to encourage this innovation for people to share. different breakthroughs of insights with the view since principle of the web, you're able to copy different aspects of the web and learn from different ways that people are approaching it. And I think that's catalyzed a whole level of innovation with the open web. The web is open browser, multi-OS and multi-device. And so there's these open standards that then all these different browser approaches, they have different devices of mobile and PC. And so just trying to like put your content out there with one standard and be able to have it delivered on many of these different devices and so not only just a progressive web app that allows you to Gracefully degrade and have different applications and ways of going from different platform to platform but given different affordances you putting out the content into one format and be able to distribute it independent of whatever the Output is and that's one of the things I'm excited to see what happens with the WebEx are and some of those other progressive web app and ways of gracefully degrading. If it's going to be immersive into 2d and see how you kind of blend the 2d with the 3d, I think is an exciting area to see where that ends up going. And then finally, people should be able to render the content as they want. So this goes back into people have screen readers, you know, they may not have full sight or full hearing. And so there's ways in which that you can take the content from the web and to be able to remix it in order to allow people to provide that information in a way that is going to be accessible to them. So the last point that I would just make of, of having this conversation with Dan, he was basically saying that he himself uses like tracker blockers and ad blockers and different ways. And he wouldn't expect other people to not do the same. And when I heard that, it in part made me like seriously consider using an ad blocker. There's a part of me that felt like there's a moral responsibility to They're trying to have ad based revenues and I wanted to support them just through these ads. Then, you know, I wasn't going to support these different ad blockers, but I tried to, I tried the ad blocker and there's some sites that you can't actually go to, but then there's other ones where there's a certain aspect of like having this right of my own data sovereignty and not being tracked and not being surveilled in that way. And that it's like a bit of a protest against a lot of the surveillance capitalism to say, Hey, I'm not willing to be tracked in this way. So. I have to find other ways. And so it's a bit of a technological vote that's pushing back to say, let's figure out new architectures that can actually sustain a lot of this. And, you know, sometimes you go to a site and you have to turn off the ad blocker and actually see it. So I feel like there's like this trade off of like, okay, I want to see this content. And so I'm willing to. Have a little bit of tracking happen with me, but you know just to see how much of your browsing experience changes once you start to Explicitly say, you know, this is what's being tracked and what's not being tracked and the previous conversation with Selena they talk about the White House extension from Mozilla to be able to see all these different tracking technologies and and to get a little bit more transparency into that, just to see how much of this whole industry is out there. And it's a bit of dilemma, as Dan says, is because there's so much of the economic business models for how the entire ecosystem is being run, and that it's a bit of this negotiation process of implementing these different technological and architectural changes to be able to say, OK, well, we're going to slowly try to add a little bit more data sovereignty and tracking protections and privacy protections in for the users. And then trying to see that at that architectural level, how that's going to shift the overall dynamic for how these different tracking technologies are going to still operate within how the web is actually funded. So, that's all that I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a licensed supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
