RESPONSE NEEDED: P3P 1.1 note publication and working group close

Dear Working Group members,

It's been a long time since you've heard much about the P3P 1.1  
working group activities. Interest in this working group has dwindled  
as companies have refocussed their priorities. Therefore, W3C  
management has recommended that we make a final publication of our  
work and close the working group down.  Although it is somewhat  
disappointing that we were unable to complete the deliverables in our  
charter, I agree that the time has come to issue a final publication  
and move on to other things. The P3P 1.1. working draft is a stable  
and implementable draft, and should there be interest in the future,  
all of our work will be documented and a new working group can pick  
up where we left off. Having been chair of one P3P working group or  
another for nearly 10 years now this decision comes almost as a  
relief to me, and I suspect to some of the rest of you who have been  
contributing to the P3P working groups for many years.

As you know, the P3P 1.1 Last Call document was published on February  
10, 2006 [1]. A small number of comments were received and documented  
[2]. No major issues within the scope of P3P 1.1 were raised during  
last call. I am grateful to Matthias Schunter, who volunteered to  
take over as editor of the document and address the minor issues and  
typos. His edited draft is available for your review [3]. You should  
not find any major changes in this draft. In order to give this draft  
a final document status, I propose that we publish it as a Working  
Group Note [4]. This is not a recommendation-track document, but it  
is something that people can refer to and cite. This is the same  
status we gave to APPEL. The APPEL note has been the basis of several  
implementations and it is frequently cited in research papers. I  
would urge anyone doing P3P implementations to include elements from  
the P3P 1.1 draft, all of which are backwards compatible with P3P 1.0.

Rigo is working on making sure the P3P 1.1 document conforms with W3C  
Note rules and will send us an editor's draft by November 7, with the  
goal of publishing the final note within a week after that. In order  
for that to happen, we need a vote of the working group to move  
forward with the publication of the note. So...

RESPONSE NEEDED:
Please review the draft at http://www.w3.org/P3P/2006/WD- 
P3P11-20061006.html (or just the changes if you reviewed the Last  
Call) and send an email to this mailing list indicating a yes or no  
vote for proceeding with a W3C Note publication. I would like to  
receive all votes by November 10 at 10 am US Eastern time. Even if  
you haven't been paying attention for a while, I encourage you to  
vote so that we have a critical mass of people voting.

Work on P3P implementations and research does continue in many  
places. As an editorial board member for several journals and a  
conference paper reviewer, I see draft papers that cite and use P3P  
on a regular basis. P3P is already built into two major web browsers,  
and it has been adopted by a significant number of web sites [5]. My  
lab at CMU operates a P3P-enabled search engine [6] and I have  
students who are doing some interesting work to see what impact  
privacy information provided via our P3P search engine has on  
consumers' purchase decisions [7]. I believe that the impact of the  
P3P 1.0 and 1.1 working groups' work will continue to be felt for  
some time to come. Thanks to all of you for your contributions to  
this effort over the past decade.

Lorrie Cranor


1. http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-P3P11-20060210/Overview.html
2. http://www.w3.org/P3P/2006/05-last-call.html
3. http://www.w3.org/2005/10/Process-20051014/tr.html#q78
4. http://www.w3.org/P3P/2006/WD-P3P11-20061006.html
5. http://lorrie.cranor.org/pubs/icec06.html
6. http://search.privacybird.com/
7. http://cups.cs.cmu.edu/soups/2006/proceedings/p133_gideon.pdf


--
Lorrie Faith Cranor, Associate Research Professor
Computer Science and Engineering & Public Policy
Carnegie Mellon University
http://lorrie.cranor.org/

Received on Friday, 27 October 2006 11:08:03 UTC