Concerned about corporate marketers monitoring your Web activities and sharing your personal information?
For three years the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has been developing something that could ease your fears: Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P), a protocol designed to inform online consumers about privacy risks.
P3P standardizes corporate privacy policies into machine-readable XML code. When you happen upon a compliant site, your browser reads the company's policy and warns you of any infringements.
But P3P has its critics. Jason Catlett, president of the privacy-advocacy firm Junkbusters, believes P3P might only worsen risks for consumers by "luring people into a false sense of privacy."
"P3P is not a silver bulletâ€"it won't solve the problem itself," acknowledges Lorrie Cranor, senior researcher at AT&T Research Labs and chair of the P3P Specification Working Group. "The other components that are going to be important include other technologies, legislation, as well as self-regulatory programs."
Not to mention a little common sense.
