Automated analysis of P3P-enabled Web sites

The Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) provides a standard computer-readable format for privacy policies and a protocol that enables web browsers to read and process these policies automatically. We developed software to query a set of web sites for P3P policies, check the validity of each policy, and analyze the information practices it describes. We used this software to analyze 588 P3P-enabled web sites found by checking for P3P policies on 5,856 web sites on 17 July 2003. The sites we checked for P3P policies were taken from several lists of popular web sites, as well as from “crawling” indexes of shopping, news, children’s and government web sites. We present the first major analysis of the data practices of P3Penabled web sites. Categories and Subject Descriptors K.4.1 [Computing Milieux]: Public policy issues – privacy. General Terms Measurement, Standardization, Legal Aspects Keywords Privacy, Platform for Privacy Preferences, P3P, Privacy Policy

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: ACMICEC
• Authors: Simon Byers, Lorrie Faith Cranor, David P. Kormann
• Keywords: ACMICEC 2003, ECommerce, P3P Policies, Privacy Preferences, Web Sites