P3P and Cookies

What is P3P? What has it got to do with privacy?

P3P (Privacy Preferences Platform) was established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to provide internet users with a sense of privacy when surfing the internet. W3C is the official web standards body, which essentially attempts to bring law and order to the Internet.

P3P started to allay consumer concern about the amount of data collected by web sites. The idea is that any site gathering information about its users should state why it wants the information, and how long information will be retained for. For example: "We are monitoring these pages to improve site usability," or "We want to make our advertising more relevant." A user visiting a site with a P3P policy has access to its privacy policies and can decide whether or not to accept cookies or use that site at all.

P3P enables you to control - at browser level - how websites use information about your visit.

You can actually set privacy preferences in your browser before you begin to surf the internet. As you download web pages a P3P-enabled server will send the content to your browser together with a privacy policy that your browser can automatically read. Before your browser displays the page it will match your privacy preferences with the site's - if there is not a match, you will be alerted so that you can decide whether to proceed or not. For a more detailed explanation of this ongoing project please click here www.w3.org/P3P/.