Platform for privacy preferences (P3P): Current status and future directions

Web sites usually express their privacy practices in natural language text that is often complex, informal and possibly confusing. The platform for Privacy Preference (P3P) has been proposed by W3C as a technology for expressing privacy practices of web sites in precise, machine readable language. This paper provides an account of the current status of research on P3P and proposes directions for future research, together with some possible solutions. Cloud computing (SaaS), anti-phishing, and mobile applications are some of the aspects that we consider. We claim that P3P and P3P-based techniques have considerable potential to be developed beyond their current status. The challenge is to design formalized privacy policy languages that can enable computers to process the privacy practices of web sites. In this way, many privacy issues, such as filtering web sites, combining their policies, etc., will be able to be dealt with automatically by privacy agents.