Upcoming: W3C Workshop on Permissions

W3C announced today a Workshop on Permissions, 5–6 December 2022, in Munich, Germany. The event is hosted by Google. The W3C Workshop on Permissions brings together security and privacy experts, UI/UX designers and researchers, browser vendors, OS developers, API authors, web publishers and users. We aim to address the privacy, security and usability challenges involved in controlling access to an increasingly powerful set of capabilities on the Web and other platforms. The scope includes:

• user concerns and preferences, including those of vulnerable individuals and communities;
• better alignment of permission lifetime/duration with user tasks;
• risks and benefits of human-centric grouping/categorization of permissions and applications;
• challenges with novel capabilities;
• capability abuse threat models and mitigations;
• scoping of permissions to origins vs. applications, relation to same origin policy;
• UIs and controls;
• integrated permission control surfaces tailored to the capability itself;
• permission transparency, accountability, and control; and
• balancing well-specified permissions UX in standards with the ability for implementers to meet the future user and product requirements.

We aim to share experiences and user studies, leading to common understanding of how to ensure user comprehension and control of powerful capabilities while managing cognitive load. Attendance is free for all invited participants and is open to the public, whether or not W3C members. For more information on the workshop, please see the workshop details and submission instructions.