Definition
The Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) project is an emerging industry standard developped by the World Wide Wed Consortium (http://www.w3.org/) as "a simple, automated way for users to gain more control over the use of personal information gathered by the Web sites they visit."

P3P is a technical standard for creating machine-readable versions of privacy policies.

Reasons for P3P
Whenever you visit a website, you provide the website owners with certain information, such as which browser you use, which pages on the site you visit and for how long, and which site you last visited. If you found the site through a search engine, the website owner can see what you searched for in order to come up with his or her site. Some sites require you to accept "cookies" (a small piece of information in order to use their services,

As a website owner, this information can be extremely useful for evaluating the effectiveness of the information on a site, or the search engine placement strategy in use. However, consumers are becoming increasingly aware of privacy-related issues on the web. The goal of the P3P standard is to allow consumers to set their personal privacy levels, and to automatically evaluate the sites they visit against the privacy preferences they have set.

As privacy concerns have been pegged as the number 1 impediment preventing consumers from becoming more comfortable surfing and purchasing goods and services through the web, there is a strong incentive for companies to adopt privacy standards such as P3P.

Pros and Cons
In theory, P3P allows you to set rules in your browser to determine what level of privacy you wish to have while surfing the Internet. When you travel to a particular website that violates the privace levels you have set, the browser could be set to prompt you or to go somewhere else. For instance, you might only give your name to organizations that pledge not to sell it to third parties without your consent.

The P3P standard is a collaborative effort between many different companies and privacy advocates, and thus has a good chance of being widely adopted. P3P is quite easy to implement, and major browsers are moving to provide native P3P support in their latest versions.

However, P3P is not perfect. Some privacy advocates disagree with the concept of P3P altogether, as it assumes that people are willing to make choices about relinquishing privacy and receiving services. Furthermore, the statements encoded in P3P are not enforced. A company could say they are doing one thing but really be doing another - thus the standard is only as good as the information it receives.

In our opinion, however, P3P is good for consumers, because it provides an easy, automatic way of parsing through the fine print of a privacy agreement.