What is P3P® Policy Editor?

The IBM P3P Policy Editor is a visual tool, with an easy-to-use interface, for creating a Web site's privacy policy in the P3P language, which can be interpreted by Web browsers and other user agents that support the Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) specification from the W3C. P3P allows users to automate the acceptance or rejection of a Web site's requests for information, based on user preferences set in browsers or client devices. Users are assured that their privacy is protected without having to read each Web site's privacy policy.

How does it work?

Using P3P, an organization posts on its Web site an XML-formatted (machine-readable) privacy policy describing its privacy practices, including the type of information collected, how the information is used, and who has access to the information. The P3P specification for declaring the types of data collected at a site can become complicated, requiring much time to develop and test and leaving Webmasters susceptible to errors. P3P Policy Editor takes the complexity out of creating a machine-readable policy by including standard data types and categories that can be quickly dropped into the policy and by providing error-checking to help locate required elements that are missing from the policy.

The machine-readable policy is intended to be interpreted only by P3P-compliant user agents. However, these policies also include the location of a human-readable privacy policy. P3P Policy Editor creates an HTML-formatted version of the policy that can be used either to base the human-readable policy on or to ensure that the machine-readable policy is consistent with the human-readable policy.

Martin Presler-Marshall is an advisory programmer at IBM's site at Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. He has been involved with Web-related software since 1995, starting as a developer on the IBM Internet Connection Server, IBM's first HTTP server product. He currently works as a privacy technology expert in IBM's Software Group. His specialty areas include privacy and privacy-related technologies, system and network performance, and caching; and he is a co-author of the P3P specification.

Mr. Presler-Marshall has a Master's degree in Computer Science, with a focus on logic programming, from Case Western Reserve University. He briefly pursued a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Mr. Presler-Marshall can be reached by e-mail here, or by postal mail at 3039 Cornwallis Rd, Research Triangle Park, N.C., 27709.

Mark Gilmore is a staff software engineer at IBM's site at Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. His interests include Unix, Java, and various Internet Technologies. Mr. Gilmore has a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of Scranton.

Terry Bleizeffer is a human factors engineer working at IBM's site at Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. He joined IBM's Santa Teresa Lab in California in 1997 and transfered to RTP in 1999. Mr. Bleizeffer has a B.A in Psychology from Indiana University and an M.S. in Psychology from the University of California at Santa Cruz.