P3P

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When developing a website that collects visitors’ data, it is important to specify a privacy policy so that site visitors know what kind of data is collected and who will access this data. So, if a user doesn’t want to share his phone number or even his employer name, he can instruct his browser to warn him. I didn’t find this feature in current browsers, though I found an addon to IE (http://www.PrivacyBird.org) that warns users of the site’s data collection policy.

So how can you put these P3P policy files on your site? You need to:

  1. Construct the policy xml file (policy1.xml, policy2.xml). You can have more than one policy file for each part of your site. These files should comply with http://www.w3.org/P3P/
  2. Generate a human readable version from your policy xml files.
  3. Construct a policy reference file, which will map parts of your site to their corresponding policy file.
  4. Publish the policy reference file to [http://www.yoursite.com/w3c/p3p.xml]

You can use P3P Policy Editor to construct policy files and the policy reference file.
Using it, you will specify the groups of data collected and for each group you specify:

  • the purpose of collecting this data and whether the user has control to opt in or opt out on each data collected or if it is required.
  • whom will use/see this data.
  • for how long the data will be kept.

After creating and uploading the policy files, you can verify the files using http://www.w3.org/P3P/validator.html

For further details check
http://www.w3.org/P3P/details.html
http://www.p3ptoolbox.org/guide/

Happy privacy setting!

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