Privacy Policy
By Bill Pitzer
Almost every site has a privacy policy, but until
recently, most policies went unnoticed except by the
most diligent Web surfers. Privacy policies have led
to a firestorm of debate recently because some
companies have been accused of breaching their
commitments to site visitors. A privacy policy is a
document that site builders must ensure is adequately
spelled out, but unfortunately, one that most sites
are ill-equipped to maintain.
Help is on the way in the form of the W3C
specification named P3P, which stands for the Platform
for Privacy Preferences Project. This is an automated
way for Web sites to post privacy policies. With P3P,
different user agents, such as browsers and proxy
servers, can automatically interpret the privacy
policy of each site you visit. The user agent
determines whether this is a site to which visitors
would be comfortable transferring data.
IBM alphaWorks' P3P Policy Editor 1.4 is not only a
visual tool for creating the P3P version of your
site's privacy policy, but it also lets you
simultaneously work on the HTML version that should be
posted on your site. The tool is currently under
development pending finalization of the P3P
specification and is written in Java. I easily
installed it on my system running the Java 1.2.2
Runtime Environment. However, Java 1.3.0 users should
note that a few issues have been discovered running in
this environment. If you'd like to follow the
development of P3P, you can find more information at
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