P3P

The Platform for Privacy Preferences Project, or P3P, is a protocol (computing) designed to give users more control of their personal information when browsing Internet Website. P3P was developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and was officially recommended on April 16, 2002.

=Overview=

As the World Wide Web became a genuine medium in which to sell products and services, Electronic commerce websites tried to collect more information about the people who purchased their merchandise. Some companies used controversial practices such as tracker HTTP cookie to ascertain the users demographic profile information and buying habits, using this information to provide specifically targetted advertisements. Users who saw this as an invasion of privacy would sometimes turn off HTTP cookies altogether, or use anonymous proxy server to keep their personal information secure.

P3P is designed to allow users to choose the level of personal information they wish to supply to websites. The website provides a machine readable policy in an XML file, which specifies how the site handles the user s personal information. A P3P enabled web browser can compare this information with the user s preferences, or display the P3P privacy report in a readable format. The user can then choose what level of personal information they wish to share and when to allow cookies.

=P3P User Agents=

Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 provides the ability to display P3P privacy policies, and compare the P3P policy with your own settings to decide whether or not to allow cookies from a particular site. Internet Explorer versions prior to 6 can use the AT&T [http://www.privacybird.com/ Privacy Bird].

The Mozilla web browser also provides an extension for P3P usage [http://www.mozilla.org/projects/p3p/].

=Criticisms=

The Electronic Privacy Information Center has been critical of P3P and believe it will make it too difficult to protect a user s privacy [http://www.epic.org/reports/prettypoorprivacy.html]. P3P is relying on each individual website to be honest with its policy files, as P3P-enabled browsers are unable to physically test that the site s privacy policy actually functions as advertised.

As people become comfortable with P3P it may be limiting the perceived need of related privacy legislation.

Michael Kaply from IBM is reported saying the following when the Mozilla Foundation was considering the removal of P3P support from their browser-line [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgiid=225287#c12]

Ah the memories. We (IBM) wrote the original P3P implementation and then Netscape proceeded to write their own. So both our companies wasted immense amounts of time that everyone thought was a crappy proposal to begin with.

Remove it.

=See also=

*Internet privacy

=External links=

*[http://www.w3.org/P3P/ W3C P3P site] *[http://www.w3.org/P3P/compliant_sites W3C partial list of P3P compliant sites] *[http://www.w3.org/TR/P3P/ W3C P3P Specifications] *[http://www.p3ptoolbox.org/ A resource for P3P related tools]