By Mo Krochmal,
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) released this week the final working draft of the Platform for Privacy Preferences, or P3P, protocol.
The P3P draft is the next-to-the-last step in a process that has stretched out over three years.
The document, produced by a committee of the W3C, an industry standards group comprising more than 200 businesses and academic institutions, is a series of steps that is proposed as a standard method to help automate and protect consumer privacy on the Internet.
This is a work-in-progess that is published for public comment before it becomes final in April 2000, said Lorrie Faith Cranor, a senior technical staff member at AT&T Labs and the chairman of the group that has been working on the proposed standard.
"This won't solve problems by itself, but it's part of a solution," Cranor said.
The standards set up a method that makes privacy policies machine-readable so the end user gets a representation of what a website posts as its policy on what it does with the consumer information it may gather in doing business.
Originally, the specification would allow for the policy to be read, and then a negotiation could follow where a user would determine how much information the site could gather. In this specification, the information is read by a browser, and then a user would have the choice of either entering the site or leaving.
"We scaled back with less emphasis on the negotiation aspect," said Cranor. "We have issued many drafts, and each has been different than the one before. This is the last call, but it is a stable draft, and one we hope people use to do prototypes."
Jason Catlette, a privacy advocate with Junkbusters of Green Brook, N.J., said regardless of intent, the proposed standard will not protect privacy.
"It's deployment is dependant on Microsoft and America Online," he said. "If it comes down too hard, they won't deploy it."
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