The Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P), developed by the World Wide Web Consortium, is emerging as an industry standard providing a simple, automated way for users to gain more control over the use of personal information on Web sites they visit. At its most basic level, P3P is a standardized set of multiple-choice questions, covering all the major aspects of a Web site's privacy policies. Taken together, they present a clear snapshot of how a site handles personal information about its users. P3P-enabled Web sites make this information available in a standard, machine-readable format. P3P enabled browsers can "read" this snapshot automatically and compare it to the consumer's own set of privacy preferences. P3P enhances user control by putting privacy policies where users can find them, in a form users can understand, and, most importantly, enables users to act on what they see.
The P3P Testsuite was developed by the Joint Research Center of the European Commission as a result of their work on a P3P Demonstrator. The testsuite is composed of two web-servers: p3ptest-1.w3.org and p3ptest-2.w3.org. While p3ptest-1 is the main test-site while p3ptest-2 is only necessary to test the Hint-mechanism. To avoid confusion, the visible pages on both servers are teh same. But the pages on p3ptest-2 redirect every request to p3ptest-1. At this moment in time, the status of the testsuite is beta. We will improve it over time. All the tests correspond to the P3P 1.0 Recommendation .
The site uses PHP-Scripts to emulate different Scenarios involving P3P. The PHP will send the right headers to the user agent (client). Depending on your preferences and on the P3P Implementation in the user-agent the corresponding page will appear or will be blocked. We know, that the user interface of the testsuite needs improvment and we are working on it.
If you are implementing P3P in a user agent, please take a look at the
archives of the P3P-Developers Mailing-List. You can also subscribe to this
list by sending an email to www-p3p-dev-request@w3.org with
subscribe
in the Subject:-line. For other questions, please
subscribe to www-p3p-policy
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last revised $Date: 2001/07/31 08:51:31 $ by $Author: rigo $