DoubleClick Teams With Privacy Council on P3P
The Privacy Council yesterday announced a strategic alliance with DoubleClick to offer DoubleClick's clients assistance with their privacy practices.The focus of the agreement is to help DoubleClick clients comply with the Platform for Privacy Preferences, known as P3P.
"The whole issue concerns P3P, and the problem that many Web sites have to date is that they don't have an effective P3P strategy," said Larry Ponemon, CEO of the Privacy Council, Richardson, TX.
P3P is a technology that lets Web surfers match their privacy preferences against the information-gathering practices of the sites they visit without having to read the sites' privacy policies.
P3P is built into Microsoft's new Internet Explorer 6.0 browser, which probably will have about 35 million users, Ponemon said.
While Web users can set their own preferences with P3P, most will not, meaning that the default settings would be in place, he said.
Under P3P, a warning appears on a user's screen if a site is not compliant.
Using Privacy Scan, a tool it developed, the Privacy Council can show companies where their Web sites will have defects under P3P and help them correct the problems.
"We can show them how to design Web sites to provide P3P compliance and also use technology like persistent cookies in compliance with the rules," Ponemon said.
