[whatwg] A mechanism to improve form autofill

[Ilya Sherman]

On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 1:23 AM, Ilya Sherman <isherman at chromium.org> wrote:

> On Thu, 26 Jul 2012, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
>> >
>> > Government-issued ID numbers might be worth adding.  In America, social
>> > security numbers are sometimes used for this purpose, but are treated as
>> > semi-secret, so you usually don't enter them on web forms. (My American
>> > college did use my social security number as an ID number, but not in
>> > web forms as far as I remember.)  But in Israel, and I assume some other
>> > countries, there are national ID numbers that are considered public
>> > info.  E.g., my Israeli id number (mispar zehut) is 332752187.  It's
>> > printed on my checks and things like that, so it's no secret, and since
>> > it's guaranteed to exist and be unique, various institutions use it for
>> > login instead of or in addition to a username -- my bank, health
>> > insurance provider, etc.
>>
>> I haven't added this yet.
>>
>> I also haven't added:
>>  - payment instrument type
>>  - payment instrument start date
>>  - payment instrument issue number (for Maestro)
>>
>> I also haven't removed, as some people suggested, the three cc-name
>> subfields.
>>
>> I'm open to making all these changes, but figured I would get some more
>> input on them first, in particular from Ilya who did the research to come
>> up with the original set of fields.
>>
>
> I have seen a relatively high number of Chrome bug reports requesting
> better handling of (e.g. government) ID numbers.  One example: [
> http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=64433 ].  I think it
> would be helpful to add these to the spec; though as subsequent posters
> have noted, there's a lot of potential complexity in how these should be
> represented.  This might fall under the broader class of "identity"-related
> fields, which I think merit their own carefully thought out set of tokens.
>  There was some work done on the beginnings of such a specification -- see
> https://wiki.mozilla.org/Identity-inputs -- but my current understanding
> is that this is an area in need of further development.
>
> The payment instrument type is almost certainly appropriate to add -- it
> is included on almost every website that I've encountered that includes
> payment card fields.  It was an oversight on my part to omit it from the
> initial proposal.
>
> The other two payment instrument field types I haven't encountered on the
> Web, as far as I can recall.  So, based on my data set accumulated while
> working on Chrome Autofill, I'm ok with leaving these out of the spec for
> now.  However, my experience is biased toward US websites; it's possible
> that these fields are more prominent internationally.
>
> The three cc-name subfields are split out surprisingly often on existing
> websites.  I was initially opposed to including these in the spec; but that
> data in support of them was overwhelming.
>
> Finally, I have gotten a request to include a field type for bank account
> numbers, though I have only seen this info actually requested on a small
> handful of extremely prominent (and generally trusted) websites: Amazon,
> PayPal, and I think Google Wallet.
>

David Holloway reminded me that bank account numbers are also commonly
requested when filling out United States tax forms.  I have seen this
information requested for tax returns on [ https://turbotax.intuit.com ];
and David pointed me to [
https://gate.link2gov.com/sfpropertytax/PropertySearch.aspx?TaxType=Secured ],
which allows you to pay be e-check and asks for your bank account's routing
and account numbers.