4:36 p.m.
Hello all,
(So much cross-posting. I can’t really even be sorry about doing it; the conversations are
happening EVERYWHERE!)
The Federation & Browsers workshop this week was quite the experience!
tl;dr - a new W3C community group is forming to focus specifically on federated identity
on the web. I am working on the charter with a handful of others, and hope to have our
first call within the next 3-4 weeks.
The first day of the workshop was primarily presentations from browser vendors (Google,
Microsoft, and Mozilla, with some short comments by Apple) and large IdPs (Google,
Microsoft, Facebook). People were able to submit questions and vote on them to direct
where we took day 2.
Day 2 was all about discussion, kicking of with a discussion on whether we all agreed to
these two statements:
• Non-transparent, uncontrollable tracking of users across the web needs to be addressed
and prevented.
• Federated login and tracking tools use the same primitives and are indistinguishable
from non-transparent, uncontrollable tracking from the browser’s perspective; browser’s
proposed mitigations for tracking will impact federated identity.
(Result: General agreement, but with significant uncertainty about the specifics.)
We wrapped up with a discussion about how to keep the conversation moving, and the group
agreed to the formation of a W3C community group specifically focused on federated
identity on the web. If and when a broader identity community group is formed (which would
cover additional topics such as Decentralized Identifiers), then the federated identity CG
would be considered a sub-group of the more general one.
I’m in the process of converting the notes to markdown format; their final location will
be here:
https://github.com/WICG/WebID/tree/main/meetings/2021
You can already find some of the slides from presenters in that repository.
If you want an early look at the notes, they were taken in Google docs:
Day
one: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16wj6UnlaePCE0sdVfkVSwoBMHuFphLuv2sptxdQ…
Day
two: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nZt-bU-9FeoaavSuB6KPC7d3vyKuOhnA5QAd8kT…
Thanks! Heather