P3P received a lot of attention when it was officially released as a Recommendation (see related press release and testimonials). A growing number of sites are implementing P3P (deploying privacy policies expressed in P3P). On the user's side (the client-side) progress has not been so remarkable. Microsoft Internet Explorer has some support for P3P. Apache Mozilla is slowly progressing towards providing support for P3P. A nice example of another type of functionality on the user's side is given by AT&T's Privacy Bird, a plugin that provides the user with visual feedback on the privacy policies of the visited site.
Part of the problem of making users enthusiastic about managing their privacy preferences is that the administrative burden of actually performing such management is daunting. This is in part dependent on the fact that the elementary language for expressing privacy protection is often directly exposed to the user, and this can be frightening for a "naive user". Some experiments have been performed on simplifying task. An example is the work done by the European Joint Reasearch Center. Projects done there have explored how to simplify the task of building privacy preferences by using templates as a starting point. We add to this area of work by illustrating how an imposed structure on preferences can assist in the manual administration of privacy preferences.
Another, quite different route for making the user enthusiastic about privacy preferences, might be to turn it into a game-like adventure. That is, make it fun to work on your preferences, and you get rewards (points, or reputation, or ...) for doing so. Such unorthodox approaches should be explored, if for no other reason than understanding better the sociological and psychological forces that has an impact on our propensity to do certain kinds of tasks.
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This activity was partly supported by grant IST-2000-28767 from the European Union's Information Society Programme to the Question How project |