Over 30 leading technology companies, privacy advocates, and
other organisations gathered yesterday in New York City to conduct
the first public tests and demonstrate implementations of the
Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P), an initiative by
the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
P3P lays down a standard form privacy policy which can be
adopted by web sites. On these sites, users’ personal information
will be quickly and automatically collaborated and interpreted by
P3P user agents. The internet user will be able to select the
degree of personal information that he or she wishes to have
publicly released and the agents will automatically limit the
disclosure of information to these preferences.
The W3C is an international industry consortium jointly run by
the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science in the USA, the National
Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA) in
France and Keio University in Japan. It was created to develop
common protocols that promote the internet’s evolution and ensure
its interoperability.
The White House and the U.S. Department of Commerce have already
stated that they will operate the new privacy system. In addition,
several prominent corporations including Proctor & Gamble and
IBM have confirmed that their sites at least partially satisfy the
P3P requirements. Further support for the project comes from
Microsoft who have confirmed that P3P technology will be present in
forthcoming versions of Windows and Internet Explorer.
Despite this clear support for P3P there remains concern over
how compliance with the P3P privacy standards will be enforced. The
chief technology officer of Webwasher.com expressed his view that
“under P3P your browser actively aggregates [personal information],
then distributes it in a nanosecond to any Web site that presents
the . If there is no means of ascertaining whether all
P3P sites actually conform to the standards, then the automated
nature of P3P has the potential to freely distribute personal
information to any number of web sites that do not possess any
privacy policy.
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