Is P3P an Answer to Protecting Information Privacy?

Abstract

Increasingly the Internet is used as a common tool for communication, information gathering, and online transactions. Information privacy is threatened as users are expected to reveal personal information without knowing the consequences of sharing their information. To that end, research groups, both from academia and industry, have embarked on the development of privacy enhancement technologies. One such technology is platform for privacy preferences (P3P). Developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), P3P has a number of prominent stakeholders such as IBM, Microsoft, and AT&T. Yet there is little general knowledge on what P3P is and the extent of its deployment by e-business organizations. This study is exploratory in nature and aims at addressing these questions; in particular, we look at P3P both as a new technology and as a standard. We use our empirical data on top-500 interactive companies to assess its adoption.