80% of surfers don’t bother reading site privacy policies and 50% of the FTSE100 don’t have adequate ones, so will the recent Worldwide Web Consortium”P3P” initiative save the day?
Topic: Data protection
Who: PA Consulting Group and the Worldwide Web Consortium
When: April – July 2002
Where: Various countries
What happened:
With heightening consumer awareness of data privacy issues, brand owners need to respond. So far, however, according to a survey recently conducted by PA Consulting, they are failing to do so. In one telling statistic, 74% of the FTSE-100 sites were revealed as gathering data on site visitors, but more than 50% either had a privacy policy rated by the study as poor quality or no privacy policy at all. It was to deal with this backwardness on the part of online data collectors that the Worldwide Web Consortium ("W3C") initiated the “Platform for Privacy Preferences Project” ("P3P"). W3C was, it says here, "Created to lead the web to its full potential by developing common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its interoperability.” It is an international industry consortium jointly run by the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science in the USA, The National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control in France and the Keio University in Japan. To date, nearly 500 organisations are members of W3C.
P3P provides a standard, simple automated way for users to gain more control over the use of their personal information on websites they visit. How it works is by first of all inviting individual internet users to decide for themselves how they want their personal data to be used by the operators of the websites that they visit. Armed with this set of the consumer's own privacy preferences, P3P can then go to work. P3P-enabled browsers then compare these preferences with the privacy policy operated by any particular site that the individual visits. If the website’s policy compares badly with the individual's privacy preferences, the individual will be notified immediately and then he or she can then take a decision on whether to terminate the site visit or continue further.
Why this matters:
The theory goes that P3P is the killer application which will prompt website operators to sharpen up their act on privacy policies and increase consumer confidence online. It certainly comes with a strong pedigree, having been devised by a working group of privacy advocates, web technology leaders, data protection commissioners and global e-commerce companies. It is also becoming part of accepted geek jargon, but to deploy a thoroughly 20th Century expression, the proof of the pudding is very much in the eating and, in this case, in whether or when the general awareness and use of P3P by net users around the world will ever reach a level where it becomes a catalyst for more responsible data processing online as promised. For more information go to www.w3.org/2002/04/p3p-pressrelease
