Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P)

Using the Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) to create and use privacy policies on your Web site.

The W3C recommendation for the P3P (Platform for Privacy Preferences) specification.

The P3P gives you the chance to make your privacy policy readable by computers which makes it more accessible to programming and so more effective.

Use this form to validate your P3P privacy policy against the W3C specification.

Did you know that some countries consider any type of potentially identifiable information can be considered private? This includes things like IP addresses and user-agents and referral information. If you are collecting that information on your Web site, you could be violating your customers' privacy.

There was a concern that using P3P would infringe upon Intermind's patent.

Follow these steps to create a P3P policy for your Web site.

Questions and answers regarding P3P and suggestions on how to implement it.

This is a very thorough "how-to" that explains how to put a P3P policy on your site, and the steps involved.

These are the principles behind the creation of P3P. They cover the responsible use of P3P technology.

A definition of the APPEL language.

This is a very dense site including where to post comments about P3P, links to the various draft documents, media coverage and more.

Once you've created a P3P policy for your site, you should validate it to make sure it meets the specifications.

There are some serious concerns with P3P and how it works. For example, P3P emphasizes a lot on the customer, and very little on the Web site itself. Also, there is no enforcement of stated policies.

This specification includes all the information needed to create P3P applications, including user agents and policy editors.

A chapter excerpted from the book Web Security, Privacy & Commerce, 2nd Edition. This chapter discusses the legal precedents for the level of privacy we might expect on the Internet.