P3P info

This option displays Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) information.

The World Wide Web Consortium's P3P enables websites to express their privacy practices in a standard format that can be retrieved automatically and interpreted easily by user agents. P3P user agents allow users to be informed of site practices (in both machine- and human-readable formats) and to automate decision-making based on these practices when appropriate. Thus users need not read the privacy policies at every site they visit.

A P3P-compliant website declares in a policy the kind of information it collects and how that information will be used. A P3P-enabled web browser can decide what to do by comparing this policy with the user's stored preferences. For example, a user may set browser preferences so that information about their browsing habits should not be collected. When the user subsequently visits a website whose policy states that a cookie is used for this purpose, the browser automatically rejects the cookie.

P3P user agents

Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 can display P3P privacy policies and compare the P3P policy with your own settings to decide whether or not to allow cookies from a particular site.

The Privacy Bird (originally developed by AT&T) is a fully featured P3P user agent that automatically searches for privacy policies at every website the user visits. It then compares the policy with the user's stored privacy preferences and notifies the user of any discrepancies.

See also

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