web site P3P adoption report

Report: Web Privacy Policies Confuse Net Surfers
Wed Jun 25,12:03 AM ET
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=581&u=/nm/20030625/tc_nm/tech_privacy_dc&printer=1

By Andy Sullivan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - "Privacy policies" that explain a company's 
Web surveillance habits have done little to dispel confusion among 
Internet users about how they are tracked online, according to a 
report released on Wednesday.

The dense, legalistic documents that many commercial Web sites post 
to explain their data-collection habits are more likely to provide 
false reassurance than clarity to Web surfers, the University of 
Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center found.

[...]

Turow recommended that Web sites be required to translate their 
privacy policies into a machine-readable code called P3P that would 
allow users to automatically steer away from sites that they would 
find too invasive. P3P was introduced over a year ago but has not 
been widely adopted.

Web sites should also be required to disclose in plain language what 
they know about their visitors, what they have done with that 
information, and what they plan to learn about them, he said.



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Received on Wednesday, 25 June 2003 09:53:29 UTC