Q&A with the AMP leadership (AMP Conf 2018)

PAUL BAKAUS: So this was a question from yesterday that I thought would be better answered by this panel. It's a hard question. And the question is-- this was asked twice, actually, in different ways-- the roadmap mentions GDPR-inspired enhancements. What can we expect from the AMP project to make sure an AMP website is able to fully comply with GDPR? And then I think related to this-- I don't know if it's completely related-- but how does the AMP client ID fix play with the European privacy law?

Do we have to include an active permission request again? RUDY GALFI: Yeah, this is a great question. So GDPR is coming up toward the end of May. AMP already supports some of the behaviors that I think are going to be relevant here. You can, for example, display an AMP user notification, and you can do things like block ad calls on that. You can block analytics on that. So these are some of the behaviors that might be relevant. But I think what's interesting about GDPR is there might be additional behaviors that people are

interested in, and there's also additional requirements that will come into play-- the idea of managing consent state in a more active way. Some of the things we're thinking about adding is basically making consent a first class notion in AMP, because right now the main way that you can control these things is through a dismissible notification, and just knowing what that state is. So I think bringing consent state as more of a bit

that you can read and set later on in a page lifecycle-- I think those are the kinds of things that will come into play. And then relating to client ID, the other thing to say about all of this is we can't give legal advice. And so what's interesting about GDPR is it's on everybody to figure out how they're going to interpret the regulation and decide how they're going to move forward with it. So if you think there are specific behaviors that you need to see from AMP, please get in touch with us through GitHub

and let us know. We're looking at the regulation and trying to plan for it as well as anybody, but it's really helpful to hear people's concrete feedback around how they're planning to address GDPR, and so we can really distill it down to the functional requirements you have. With respect to client ID API-- again, that's an area where we can't offer the legal advice. But what I can say is, Chris had the really helpful presentation about it earlier today, and so for more details on it, you should go check out the Google Analytics documentation. And there are policies associated with using that API that you should take note of,

and those may be relevant for you in implementing it. PAUL BAKAUS: Actually, while you're mentioning the client ID API, there was another one that was specific about how to find more information if you're not using Google Analytics, but using a different analytics provider. RUDY GALFI: So there's two tracks of the roadmap looking forward. So one track is around opening up to other analytics vendors.

So this is an API, and we are committed to working with other vendors to be able to make use of it, just as Google Analytics is making use of it. So for those vendors, please get in touch with us. And for folks who are relying on those vendors, please make sure your vendors are aware, because there is also work on their side, to make sure that they're going to do the reconciliation properly. The other track is around opening up access. It's an API that's useful for analytics. It's also an API that can be really useful for other kinds of things where

you want to know user state. And so it's called an API, and so we are looking to expose it as an API that people can just directly use and interact with. PAUL BAKAUS: Thank you, Rudy. So the next question I found kind of cool. It's kind of an odd one. But it's both easy to answer and shows the benefits of AMP, so I want to do it anyway, which is, why can't progressive web apps be more modular, like AMP, and load the JS modules you want, and use JSON or something to control the way it behaves?