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P3P - Platform for Privacy Preferences
August 12, 2002
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P3P is a system for making Web site privacy policies
machine-readable. It's been around for a while now and is a W3C
recommendation, yet still isn't very popular. One reason is that
it's technically quite complicated, requiring an XML file and
additions to HTTP cookie headers. Here's a quick introduction.
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The idea behind the system is that sites create P3P files
describing their privacy policies, which can easily be read by
browser software. Visitors set their own privacy preferences on
their browsers, and if those preferences and the policies of
visited sites match up, everybody is happy and the system stays
in the background. If they don't match, the browser can point
this out and ask the user what to do. It can also prevent actions
that would otherwise happen automatically, for example it can
block cookies if the user's preferences don't match the site's
cookie policy.
P3P stands for Platform for Privacy Preferences, and version 1.0
is a W3C recommendation, which is as official as anything on the
Internet gets (there is an earlier version that is best ignored).
Some well-known sites use P3P, for example Yahoo!, About,
Angelfire and Dell. Their sites include a P3P file written in XML
that is effectively a quantitative version of their privacy
policy. And if they use cookies they also include a second
element, a compact file of abbreviations corresponding to their
policies, that is delivered with HTTP cookie headers.
On the browser side, Netscape 7 is compliant with P3P, and IE6 is
compliant with the cookie element of the platform, though not the
other parts. This means that IE6 users (around 30% of Internet
users at the time of writing) can set their own privacy
preferences for cookies and the browser will automatically block
those that don't match up.
Sounds wonderful. So why aren't privacy advocates dancing in the
streets and telling everybody this was exactly what they've been
waiting for? Perhaps because the system has no legislative
consequence or method of enforcement. In short, it's a bit
toothless. If a site wants to say one thing but actually do
another, it can do that in machine-readable form just as easily
as it previously could in words. It's ironic to note that one or
two of the early adopters of P3P (not those listed above) are the
very sites that privacy campaigners have been battling for years.
Yet some privacy groups were involved in the creation of the
platform and support it. You can read more details about them
here,
in a piece by Lorrie Faith Cranor, a prime-mover in the P3P
project.
Whatever the pros and cons and whatever its level of
effectiveness, it's a system that many webmasters are likely to
come across in the near future. If your site sets cookies then
they could be rejected by some users with IE6 if you don't follow
the P3P system.
In this article we'll examine what goes inside the XML file,
where it resides, how it's linked, and what goes inside the
corresponding compact file. This is an introduction to the subject
and not a reference guide. If you want to create your own P3P
files you'll need to look at the W3C specification and it's
highly likely that you'll also need to download helper software
to deal with the complicated process of creating the files
themselves (links are given at the end of this article). But if
that's your aim, it's still likely that you'll find this
introduction useful, because the W3C specification is a tricky
one to follow.
Contents:
A sample P3P file
A sample P3P file (Cont.)
Policy Reference File
Compact Policy
A sample P3P file - Page 2
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