Sites Wary of Adopting P3P

technogamy writes: "CNN is reporting on the industry's take on P3P, the W3C's Platform for Privacy Preferences.According to the article, the W3C is expected by April to formally adopt P3P -- of course, as many of you are aware, Microsoft's IE6 already includes an implementation of the client side of P3P. 'Because Microsoft's browser checks for P3P, sites risk getting flagged if they don't adopt it.' P3Pizing (or 'pethripizing') a complex site can evolve into a Herculean task...! (See also EPIC's critique of P3P.)"

Comments

Mixed thoughts..

[steppin_razor_LA]

I haven't read the full specifications -- so take anything I write with a grain of salt. I've spent years building web applications, authored a popular anti-spam package, and have done some work building an advertising filtering & privacy enhancement proxy server-based package.

It seems to me that a better approach would be something like this (call it Personal Information Widget):

User puts all of their personal information into some form of a "wallet" (yes - I know there are technologies similar to this) -- the information resides on their computer not in a passport on a third party server.

When a user goes to a site and wishes to sign up for registration, to purchase something, etc -- there should be a mechanism where that site is able to formulate a list of the fields that it wants + requires for registration. The site will send this (i.e. XML) to the Personal Information Widget.

The PIW will pop a window on the user's screen showing them what information the site wants + requires. The other can then choose to "deny" "allow all" "allow required" or "custom".

If they deny -- end of transaction.
Allow all -- give the site everything it wants
Allow required - give the site only required fields
Custom - chose to give the site information different than in your profile.

This sort of approach would solve one of the major problems of building registration-based sites -- the pain in the ass factor of getting people to type in their information for the Xth time -- without doing anything sneaky about privacy.

In an ideal world, I would be able to choose to allow cookies that are required for a web application to funciton, but deny cookies used to track my viewing habits (especially across multiple sites). I don't think that a "protocol" can really solve this problem though.

Once a site uses cookies, they inherently have the ability to track you -- whether or not that is there intent -- this protocol doesn't really protect your privacy.

I'm not really opposed to cookies -- as a web developer, it is painful for me to imagine coding without them! That said, I don't like the idea of someone tracking my usage habits across multiple sites and then potentially correlating that back w/ registration information to me.

I tend to disallow third party cookies. I know that this breaks a number of 1x1 pixel tracking tools -- but this same sort of technology could be ran off the web servers of the clients or if it was really necessary to outsource it -- you could use DNS (i.e. tracking.yourcompany.com points to webtrendslive.com ) to limit the tracking cookies to a single domain.

You can disallow third party cookies and protect your privacy that way w/o this extra layer of technology added.

I am a priori (guess I'm being closed minded) opposed to anything that facilitates that automatic transfer of information. I just can't wait to see someone find an exploit....