ACTION-229: Draft crisp definition [of data append]

History: action created late July with a two week deadline. Near the end of those two weeks, Chris sent a draft to Shane before leaving on vacation. Shane sent comments to Chris, but Chris did not have time to respond to them. Shane believed the text was not finalized enough to share with the group on Aug 22, when we discussed reassigning to another WG member but decided not to do so, expecting Chris imminently back in town. On Aug 29th, we had no volunteers to take up this action in Chris' absence; usually we would close the action at that point, if not well before. Aleecia sent a reminder to Chris indicating text must be sent to the dlist by Sept 5th or we will close this for lack of interest.

Potential definition of Data Append: the act of adding new information acquired from a third party to information collected about a website visitor.

Use Cases: Current business practices that would qualify as a “data append” vary greatly in scope, utility and function. For example:

1) Firstparty.com partners with Nike. When a customer buys a Nike shoe, they get 6 months free of a health-related service on the firstparty.com. The customer must visit firstparty.com and enter a code to receive the service. When the customer visits Firstparty.com, they enter the code which firstparty.com matches up to the sale of the Nike shoe. The process of matching up a code with the offline sale would be considered a data append. With restrictions on data append, DNT:1 users would not be able to participate in promotional campaigns.

2) Firstparty.com has a large database of customers. Occasionally, they buy data from a third party to clean up the database (purge bad email addresses, correct address information, etc). This would be considered a data append.

3) A user wants to create an account on Firstparty.com. They type in their address and firstparty.com uses a third party data provider to automatically fill-in the zip code. That would be a data append.

4) Firstparty.com sells flowers via business relationships with florists around the country. When the user visits the site, firstparty.com might use a third party that matches the user’s IP address with the user’s likely location within a metropolitan area. The location information is then used to customize the inventory available to that customer. This practice would also be a data append.

5) Firstparty.com might acquire data from a third party about the demographics and behavior of firstparty.com’s users. The third party collected the data after users opted in. This would be considered a data append despite the fact that users opted in to the third party data collection.

Discussion on the mailing list starts here: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-tracking/2012Sep/0002.html