| Privacy homeFor the past 9 years, the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) was the very center of the W3C Privacy Activity. The P3P Specification Working Group has now completed its work on P3P 1.1 by delivering a Last Call Working Draft. Following the change in the privacy landscape following the 9/11 events, the group found there is insufficient momentum for implementations at this point in time. Although the group believes that P3P 1.1 is ready for implementation, it decided not to enter Candidate Recommendation, published the current specification as a Working Group Note, and have thus completed their last deliverable. The P3P Specification Working Group was closed on 21 November 2006.
The P3P Specification Working Group delivered multiple important milestones for the Web. The most important documents are listed here:
It is important to note that the P3P Specification Working Group always looked further ahead. This is demonstrated by the three Workshops organized after the P3P 1.0 Recommendation:
From the workshops one can already flair the evolution. P3P was developed in a context of the Web facing a human end-user using the Web to browse information. Nowadays, the world has become more complicated. Information offers and services facing the user are often assembled ad-hoc in the backend using web services of different providers in a social network made of contracts and now being mirrored into our ICT network infrastructure. In the early P3P days, companies wrestled with the policy to show to their consumers. They looked at their current practices and things where changed and streamlined to accommodate the privacy challenge inside enterprises.
In order to be able to handle the increased complexity inherent to the management of privacy inside enterprises, those challenges where discussed and proposals where made. Enterprises are confronted with a wide range of privacy expectations from promises (policies) they made to the user, from regulators and competitors. In order to respond to all those challenges, enterprises adapted their IT infrastructure to also handle privacy. As long as this remains within one company, this is not an issue. But our economy is based on massive exchange and use of personal data. This means the internal handling of privacy metadata has to be interoperable if it comes to a data transfer over enterprise borders.
The P3P Specification Working Group was closed on 21 November 2006. The Privacy Activity remains open to possibly accommodate further actions from the Workshop on Languages for Privacy Policy Negotiation and Semantics-Driven Enforcement.
The last workshop on Languages for Privacy Policy Negotiation and Semantics-Driven Enforcement does address this new challenge. W3C is again at the cutting edge of the privacy challenge and tries to respond to companies' needs. So far, there was no concrete proposal for further work, but people in the privacy community would like the W3C to create a coordination platform for current research and exchange of ideas. This is currently under consideration by W3C.
There are currently no open groups in this Activity.
This Activity Statement was prepared for the April 2008 W3C Advisory Committee Meeting (Members only) per section 5 of the W3C Process Document. Generated from group data.
Rigo Wenning, Privacy Activity Lead
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