The Platform for Privacy Preferences Project, or P3P, is a protocol allowing website
Website
A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a collection of related web pages containing images, videos or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet...
s to declare their intended use of information they collect about browsing users. Designed to give users more control of their personal information when browsing, P3P was developed by the World Wide Web Consortium
World Wide Web Consortium
The World Wide Web Consortium is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web .Founded and headed by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations which maintain full-time staff for the purpose of working together in the development of standards for the...
(W3C) and officially recommended on April 16, 2002.
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
became a genuine medium in which to sell products and services, electronic commerce
Electronic commerce
Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce, eCommerce or e-comm, refers to the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. However, the term may refer to more than just buying and selling products online...
websites tried to collect more information about the people who purchased their merchandise. Some companies used controversial practices such as tracker cookies
HTTP cookie
A cookie, also known as an HTTP cookie, web cookie, or browser cookie, is used for an origin website to send state information to a user's browser and for the browser to return the state information to the origin site...
A demographic or demographic profile is a term used in marketing and broadcasting, to describe a demographic grouping or a market segment...
information and buying habits, using this information to provide specifically targeted advertisements. Users who saw this as an invasion of privacy
Privacy
Privacy is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves and thereby reveal themselves selectively...
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:
which information the server stores:
which kind of information is collected (identifying or not);
which particular information is collected (IP address, email address, name, etc.);
use of the collected information:
how this information is used (for regular navigation, tracking, personalization, telemarketing, etc.);
who will receive this information (only the current company, third party, etc.);
permanence and visibility:
how long information is stored;
whether and how the user can access the stored information (read-only, optin, optout).
Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
file or can be included, in compact form, in the HTTP header. The location of the XML policy file that applies to a given document can be:
HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
head of the document
if none of the above is specified, the well-known location/w3c/p3p.xml is used (for a similar location compare /favicon.ico
Favicon
A favicon , also known as a shortcut icon, Web site icon, URL icon, or bookmark icon, is a file containing one small icons, most commonly 16×16 pixels, associated with a particular Web site or Web page...
)
P3P allows to specify a max-age for caching. A dummy /w3c/p3p.xml file could use this feature:
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
Windows Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year...
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. However, the P3P functionality in Internet Explorer extends only to cookie blocking, and will not alert you to an entire web site that violates your privacy preferences. Users who wish to use a full P3P user agent should use the AT&T
AT&T
AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications corporation headquartered in Whitacre Tower, Dallas, Texas, United States. It is the largest provider of mobile telephony and fixed telephony in the United States, and is also a provider of broadband and subscription television services...
The Carnegie Mellon University Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory was established in the Spring of 2004 to bring together Carnegie Mellon University researchers working on a diverse set of projects related to understanding and improving the usability of privacy and security software and systems...
The Carnegie Mellon University Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory was established in the Spring of 2004 to bring together Carnegie Mellon University researchers working on a diverse set of projects related to understanding and improving the usability of privacy and security software and systems...
. It is a publicly available "P3P-enabled search engine." A user can enter a search term along with their stated privacy preferences, and is then presented with a list of search results which are ordered based on whether the sites comply with their preferences. This works by crawling the web and maintaining a P3P cache for every site that ever appears in a search query. The cache is updated every 24 hours so that every policy is guaranteed to be relatively up to date. The service also allows users to quickly determine why a site does not comply with their preferences, as well as allowing them to view a dynamically generated natural language privacy policy based on the P3P data. This is advantageous over simply reading the original natural language privacy policy on a web site because many privacy policies are written in legalese and are extremely convoluted. Additionally, in this case the user does not have to visit the web site to read its privacy policy.
Benefits
P3P allows browsers to understand their privacy policies in a simplified and organized manner rather than searching throughout the entire website. By setting your own privacy settings on a certain level, P3P will automatically block any cookies that you might not want on your computer. Additionally, the W3C explains that P3P will allow browsers to transfer user data to services, ultimately promoting an online sharing community.
Additionally, the P3P Toolbox developed by the Internet Education Foundation recommends, that anyone who is concerned about increasing their users’ trust and privacy should consider implementing P3P. The P3P toolbox site explains how companies have taken individuals data in order to promote new products or services. Furthermore, in recent years companies have taken individuals information and created profiles, which they then market without the individuals consent. Moreover, all this data is misused and we as consumers pay the price and become worrisome of issues such as: junk mail, identity theft and forms of discrimination; therefore implementing P3P's protocol is good and beneficial for internet browsers.
Moreover, since there has been an increase of browsers there are more users at risk running into privacy problems. But the Internet Education Foundation points out that, “P3P has been developed to help steer the force of technology a step further toward automatic communication of data management practices and individual privacy preferences.”
Electronic Privacy Information Center is a public interest research group in Washington, D.C. It was established in 1994 to focus public attention on emerging civil liberties issues and to protect privacy, the First Amendment, and constitutional values in the information age...
(EPIC) has been critical of P3P and believes P3P makes it too difficult for users to protect their privacy.
In 2002 it assessed P3P, and referred to the technology as a “Pretty Poor Policy”. According to the EPIC, some P3P software is too complex and difficult for the average person to understand, and many Internet users are unfamiliar with how to use the default P3P software on their computers or how to install additional P3P software. Another concern is that websites are not obligated to use P3P, and neither are Internet users. P3P has been known to undermine public confidence by collecting enormous amounts of information that can be used against its user. Moreover, the EPIC website claims that P3Ps protocol would become burdensome for the browser and not as beneficial or efficient as it was intended to be.
The basic idea of privacy protection can be misleading to the visitors on the site. For example, people think that their privacy is actually being protected, but it is not. P3P facilitates data collection from websites. If the actual intention of P3P was to protect visitors to web sites then the information gathering would not be so easy to pass along personal information. Also, people who visit websites where P3P is present are uninformed and misunderstand the level of privacy that P3P provides. There needs to be more effective ways of educating people on the level of privacy and what P3P actually does to protect people.
Another main concern is that the data that is collected does not have an expiration date. People who buy something on the internet will have that information saved for an infinite amount of time, whether it will be recorded for a year or ten. This problem has led people to question where their information is being distributed to and for how long third parties will have access to their information. The idea that people’s personal information can be distributed to other people for an indeterminate amount of time makes people very uncomfortable.
A key problem that occurs with the use of P3P is that there is a lack of enforcement. Thus, promises made to users of P3P can go unfulfilled. Though by using P3P a company/website makes a promise of privacy and of the use of gathered data to the site’s users, there are no real legal ramifications if the company decides to use the information for other functions. Currently, there are no actual laws that have been passed by the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
about data protection. Though it would be nice to be able to trust every company that states its use for our information, there is no binding reason that the company must actually adhere to the rules it says it will comply by. Though using P3P technically qualifies as a contract, the lack of federal regulation downplays the need for companies to abide.
The agreement to use P3P not only puts in place unenforceable promises, but it also prolongs the adoption of federal laws that would actually inhibit the access and ability to use private information. If the government were to step in and attempt to protect Internet users with federal laws on what information can be accessed, and specific regulations on how user information can be used, companies wouldn’t maintain the leeway they do now to use information as they please, despite what they may actually tell users. In 2002, then EPIC employee Chris Hoofnagle argued that P3P was displacing chances for government regulation of privacy.
Critics of P3P also argue that non-compliant sites are excluded. According to a study done by CyLab Privacy Interest Group at Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States....
only 15% of the top 5,000 websites incorporate P3P. Therefore many sites that don’t include the code but do practice high privacy standards will not be accessible to users who use P3P as their only online privacy guide.
EPIC, the technology's obviously largest critic, also talks about how the development and implementation of P3P can cause a monopoly of private information. Since it tends to be only major companies who implement P3P on their websites, only these major companies are tending to then gather this information seeing as only their privacy policies can compare to privacy preferences of users. The EPIC website says, "The incredible complexity of P3P, combined with the way that popular browsers are likely to implement the protocol would seem to preclude it as a privacy-protective technology," EPIC continues on to state, "Rather, P3P may actually strengthen the monopoly position over personal information that U.S. data marketers now enjoy."
The failure for its immediate adoption can be related to the idea of it being a notice and choice approach that doesn’t comply with the Fair Information Practices. According to the Chairman of the FTC, privacy laws are key in today’s society in order to protect the consumer from providing too much personal information for other’s benefit. Some believe that there should be a limit to the collection and use of the consumer’s personal data online. Currently sites are not required under any United States laws to comply with the privacy policies they publish, therefore P3P causes some controversy with consumers who are concerned about the release of their personal information and are only able to rely on P3P’S protocol to protect their privacy.
As people become comfortable with P3P, the technology may be limiting the perceived need of related privacy legislation.
Michael Kaply from IBM is reported saying the following when the Mozilla Foundation
Mozilla Foundation
The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that exists to support and provide leadership for the open source Mozilla project. The organization sets the policies that govern development, operates key infrastructure and controls trademarks and other intellectual property...
was considering the removal of P3P support from their browser-line:
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.
Opera Software ASA is a Norwegian software company, primarily known for its Opera family of web browsers with over 220 million users worldwide. Opera Software is also involved in promoting Web standards through participation in the W3C. The company has its headquarters in Oslo, Norway and is...
, explains the deliberate lack of P3P support in their browser:
At the moment, we aren't sure whether P3P is the best solution. P3P is among the specifications we are considering for support in the future. There have been some issues with how well P3P will protect privacy, and for that reason we have decided to wait until these are resolved.
Alternatives
P3P user agents are not the only option available for Internet users that want to ensure their privacy
Internet privacy
Internet privacy involves the right or mandate of personal privacy concerning the storing, repurposing, providing to third-parties, and displaying of information pertaining to oneself via the Internet. Privacy can entail both Personally Identifying Information or non-PII information such as a...
An anonymous remailer is a server computer which receives messages with embedded instructions on where to send them next, and which forwards them without revealing where they originally came from...
An anonymizer or an anonymous proxy is a tool that attempts to make activity on the Internet untraceable.It is a proxy server computer that acts as an intermediary and privacy shield between a client computer and the rest of the Internet...
.
The main alternative to P3P may not be these technologies, but instead stronger laws to regulate what kind of information from Internet users can be collected and retained by websites. For example, in Europe the Data Protection Directive provides individuals with a certain set of principles about how personal information is collected and the person's rights to protecting their personal data. The act allows individuals to control the type of information that is being collected from them. Various principles are included within the act, such the rule that individual has the right to retrieve the data collected about them at any time under certain conditions. Moreover, the individual's personal information cannot be kept longer than necessary, and personal information cannot be released to others unless the individual gives their consent.
Currently, the United States has no federal law protecting the privacy of personal information shared online. However, there are some sectoral laws at the federal and state level that offer some protection for certain types of information collected about individuals. For example, the Fair Credit Reporting Act
Fair Credit Reporting Act
The Fair Credit Reporting Act is a United States federal law that regulates the collection, dissemination, and use of consumer information, including consumer credit information. Along with the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act , it forms the base of consumer credit rights in the United States...
(FCRA) of 1970 makes it legal for consumer reporting agencies to disclose personal information only under three specified circumstances: credit, employment or insurance evaluation; government grant or license; or a “legitimate business need” that involves the consumer. A list of other sectoral privacy laws in the United States can be viewed at the Consumer Privacy Guide's website.
The future of P3P
There are many groups who are working to further the future of P3P to make it easier for people to use. Some of these groups are:
Transparent Accountable Datamining Initiative (TAMI) is a group out of MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The goal of TAMI is to create technical, legal, and policy foundations for transparency and accountability in large-scale aggregation. TAMI hopes to help people manage privacy risks in a world where technology is constantly changing.
Policy Aware Web (PAW) is a scalable mechanism for the exchange of rules and proofs for unlimited access control to the Web. “It creates a system of Policy Aware infrastructure using systematic Web rules language with a theorem prover”.
