Re: AT&T birdware shows adoption problems...

Thanks for the feedback.  I missed that top section as being special.  I
understand your comment about a default, but medium is pre-selected, and
most people stick with pre-selected; and there's a bug in custom that I
selected ALL boxes just to play, but on restart, it unchecked everything.
My concern is not so much around the tool, which is betaware, but with the
idea that people will be turned off by a technology that seemingly complains
about a site like the w3c.

For example, if the site actually collected personal info from me, then I'd
be concerned that I can't change that info.  If the site is only doing
anonymous logging and such about my activities (it has no way to know me
since I don't ever login or register), then being unable to change my info
doesn't bother me.  I presume that's the case with the w3c, since it doesn't
know how I'm going to interact, so it has to assume the broadest use of the
pages.

I've seen the same problem with my web site, which tries to put into a
single P3P the contents of the previous textual privacy policy.  You can
browse my web site without any real tracking on than page hits from the web
log (something nearly all sites do not to invade privacy, but to see if
there are problems, which browsers are most popular, and which pages are
seen most often), but there are pages where you can register and even become
a customer.  What P3P seems to force is a need to create many policies for
different pages on a site and "hope" that you have it all correct for all
the ways a person can interact with your site, because is single policy
incorrectly makes it look like visiting any page on my site has the same
privacy issues.  Creating multiple policies is even more onerous on web site
operators, increases legal exposure if you get it wrong, and may just mean
that people stop caring because they'll see RED and YELLOW birds on nearly
every site they visit, so the information becomes meaningless to them.

Anyway, it's a cool tool that I can use to tweak my policies only because I
find technology like P3P to be a challenge and I want my visitors to know I
ensure their privacy.  I was just sad that my P3P isn't giving that
impression if you use a tool like privacybird, though the text comments
"clear up" most of the issues that the automated flags show as being a
privacy issue.  My concern is that if implementation of P3P shows a brochure
or info site appear to be a privacy concern for whatever reason, then
perhaps sites will be less inclined to participate.

David

Received on Friday, 8 February 2002 11:19:21 UTC