Re: Disavowing Legal Liability

Section 4.5 of the specification says that full policies that
include mandatory extensions must not be represented
as compact policies. The DSA token you describe sounds
like it would be a mandatory extension. Thus what you
describe is a violation of the P3P specification.

Regards,

Lorrie Cranor
P3P Specification Working Group Chair


----- Original Message -----
From: "Ben Wright" <Ben_Wright@compuserve.com>
To: "P3P Policy" <www-p3p-policy@w3.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 23, 2001 3:45 PM
Subject: Disavowing Legal Liability


> P3P Policy List:
>
> I am a lawyer studying Internet Explorer 6's implementation of P3P.
>
> Web administrators will be reacting to IE 6's P3P implementation as the
> browser is rolled out to the market.  I am concerned that administrators
> will expose themselves to unwarranted legal liability through the
> statements they try to make in compact P3P policies.  I'm looking for a
way
> to disclaim liability in compact policies.
>
> I'm thinking about suggesting that web administrators add the token "DSA"
> at the end of their compact policies.  DSA is not defined in the P3P
> specification, but it would be defined in full P3P policies and elsewhere
> as meaning that the web administrator disavows any legal liability
> associated with the compact policy.
>
> I see in the update for P3P specification section 4.2 that "If an
> unrecognized token appears in a compact policy, the compact policy has the
> same semantics as if that token was not present."
> http://www.w3.org/P3P/updates.html
>
> My question:  Suppose a user agent like IE 6 sees, with respect to a
> certain cookie, a compact policy that ends with the token "DSA". For
> purposes of the user agent's decision on how to handle the cookie, will
the
> agent simply ignore the DSA token and treat the cookie as it otherwise
> would in the absence of the token?  It seems to me that the answer should
> be yes, but I'm not technically savvy enough to know for sure.
>
> Is anyone aware of someone doing something like this?
>
> I would be happy to hear other thoughts anyone wishes to share about this
> idea.
>
> --Ben Wright
> ben_wright@compuserve.com
> tel 214-403-6642
> http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Ben_Wright
>
>

Received on Thursday, 23 August 2001 20:39:17 UTC