P3P

The Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) is a allowing websites to declare their intended use of information they collect about web browser users. Designed to give users more control of their personal information when browsing, P3P was developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and officially recommended on April 16, 2002. Development ceased shortly thereafter and there have been very few implementations of P3P. Microsoft Internet Explorer and Edge were the only major browsers to support P3P. The president of TRUSTe has stated that P3P has not been implemented widely due to the difficulty and lack of value.

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 cookies to ascertain the users' demographic information and buying habits, using this information to provide specifically targeted advertisements. Users who saw this as an invasion of privacy would sometimes turn off HTTP cookies or use proxy servers to keep their personal information secure. P3P is designed to give users a more precise control of the kind of information that they allow to release. According to the W3C the main goal of P3P “is to increase user trust and confidence in the Web through technical empowerment.”

P3P is a machine-readable language that helps to express a website’s data management practices. P3P manages information through privacy policies. When a website uses P3P, they set up a set of policies that allows them to state their intended uses of personal information that may be gathered from their site visitors. When a user decides to use P3P, they set their own set of policies and state what personal information they will allow to be seen by the sites that they visit. Then when a user visits a site, P3P will compare what personal information the user is willing to release, and what information the server wants to get – if the two do not match, P3P will inform the user and ask if he/she is willing to proceed to the site, and risk giving up more personal information. As an example, a user may store in the browser preferences that information about their browsing habits should not be collected. If the policy of a Website states that a cookie is used for this purpose, the browser automatically rejects the cookie. The main content of a privacy policy is the following:

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