Automated Analysis of P3P-Enabled Web Sites

Abstract

The Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) provides a standard computer-readable format for privacy policies and a protocol that enables web browsers to read and process these policies automatically. We developed software to query a set of web sites for P3P policies, check the validity of each policy, and analyze the information practices it describes. We used this software to analyze 588 P3P-enabled web sites found by checking for P3P policies on 5,856 web sites on 17 July 2003. The sites we checked for P3P policies were taken from several lists of popular web sites, as well as from "crawling" indexes of shopping, news, children's and government web sites. We present the first major analysis of the data practices of P3P-enabled web sites.

Citation

Simon Byers, Lorrie Faith Cranor, and David Kormann. Automated Analysis of P3P-Enabled Web Sites. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Electronic Commerce (ICEC2003). Pittsburgh, PA, October 1-3, 2003.

Full Text

• Definitive version in ACM Digital Library
PDF (authors' version)
• PDF (earlier tech report version, includes list of P3P-enabled web sites in appendix)