P3P Work suspended

Status: P3P Work suspended

After a successful Last Call, the P3P Working Group decided to publish the P3P 1.1 Specification as a Working Group Note to give P3P 1.1 a provisionally final state.
The P3P Specification Working Group took this step as there was insufficient support from current Browser implementers for the implementation of P3P 1.1. The P3P 1.1 Working Group Note contains all changes from the P3P 1.1 Last Call. The Group thinks that P3P 1.1 is now ready for implementation. It is not excluded that W3C will push P3P 1.1 until Recommendation if there is sufficient support for implementation.
On the other hand, P3P keeps being the basis of a number of research directions in the area of privacy world wide. One might cite the PRIME Project as well as the Policy aware Web. Many other approaches also follow the descriptive metadata approach started by P3P. Such projects are invited to send email to to be listed here.

What is P3P?

The Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) enables Websites to express their privacy practices in a standard format that can be retrieved automatically and interpreted easily by user agents. P3P user agents will allow users to be informed of site practices (in both machine- and human-readable formats) and to automate decision-making based on these practices when appropriate. Thus users need not read the privacy policies at every site they visit.

Why is P3P useful?

P3P uses machine readable descriptions to describe the collection and use of data. Sites implementing such policies make their practises explicit and thus open them to public scrutiny. Browsers can help the user to understand those privacy practises with smart interfaces. Most importantly, Browsers can this way develop a predictable behavior when blocking content like cookies thus giving a real incentive to eCommerce sites to behave in a privacy friendly way. This avoids the current scattering of cookie-blocking behaviors based on individual heuristics imagined by the implementer of the blocking tool which will make the creation of stateful services on the web a pain because the state-retrievel will be unpredictable.

Reference:W3.ORG