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

["John Levine" <[e-mail]>]

>... 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.

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, and you can turn it on and off.  Can you
clarify why this feature doesn't work, and why they couldn't use the
safe hint flag to set the same preference?

R's,
John