Re: Last Call: <draft-nottingham-safe-hint-05.txt> (The "safe" HTTP Preference) to Proposed Standard

[Yoav Nir <[e-mail]>]

> On Oct 24, 2014, at 11:28 PM, John Levine <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
>> ... The result is that there’s no way for a content provider to know
>> what a user means when their browser emits the “safe” hint, and no way for the user
>> to know what kind of content they are going to get.
> 
> Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and Google's Bing search
> engine have already implemented it.  Could you please clarify why
> Bing's implementation doesn't work?  On the Bong homepage at
> http://www.bing.com, there's a gear icon at the upper right.  Click
> that, and you'll find a discussion of their existing SafeSearch
> feature that may be helpful.

So is the Prefer: Safe header the same as “Moderate SafeSearch”, or “Strict SafeSearch”. Because apparently they need two bits of information, not just one.

Youtube and Goodle Search have just one bit. Flickr, deviantArt have multiple bits. 

> 
> At the bottom of Google's search page at https://www.google.com is a
> "Settings" button.  If you click that, you'll find that one of the
> settings is an option called SafeSearch that you can turn on and off.
> It's currently implemented in a cookie, but I hope it's obvious how
> they could use the safe hint to turn on the same setting.  Can you
> clarify why this feature doesn't work, and why using the safe hint
> would make it worse?
> 
>> Section 3 mentions YouTube. That is actually a perfect example of what I mean. Sites
>> like YouTube, deviantArt, Flickr, and Wattpad, even Wikipedia provide user-generated
>> content.How are they to decide what is and isn’t “safe”?
> 
> I'm just guessing, but my guess is that they will do it exactly the
> way they do right now.  If you look at https://www.youtube.com and
> scroll to the bottom of the page, you will see a box where it says
> "Safety" Off" or "Safety: On".  If you click it, they show a short
> summary of what it means, 

True, except that with a browser hint, you don’t get to see the site-specific explanation of what “safe” means.

Yoav