“Richard Purcell, Microsoft’s director of corporate privacy,
said the company would deliver tools this fall based on the
Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P). He made the
announcement at the Computers, Freedom & Privacy Conference,
which took place last week in Toronto.”
“P3P is being developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C),
an Internet standards body that plans to finalize the platform this
summer. Microsoft’s P3P tools would convert a company’s privacy
statements into a machine-readable format. This way, users would be
warned if a site they are visiting gathers more personal
information than they are willing divulge or if a site distributes
data to outside parties.”
“To create these news tools, Microsoft will update its
Privacy Wizard to generate a P3P-compliant XML object that will be
able to interpret and describe a Web site’s privacy statement.
The company will also offer a P3P-based add-on to its Internet
Explorer browser and the competing Netscape Communications Corp.
browser.”