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technologies
This page
highlights technologies such as the proposed P3P standard.
Specific features of the European Commission's 1997
Working Documents on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (WDPET)
have been superseded but the set remains a useful
introduction to concepts and terminologies.
Encryption and Anonymity
There's
information about anonymity tools in our separate Security guide.
P3P
The second week of June 2000 saw the release
of a draft of the Platform For Privacy Preferences (P3P)
standard.
P3P, developed under the
auspices of the World Wide Web Consortium, attempts to provide a global
standard that would allow users to restrict their browsers to those
sites that abide by specific limits on data collection.
It has,
however, been widely criticised
as complex, confusing and in practice likely to undermine privacy
protection of individual internet users.
A detailed paper on
P3P by the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) and the Ontario
Information & Privacy Commissioner is available on the CDT
site.
Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy
Information Centre (EPIC)
offered a sharp critique
of P3P, self-regulation and Lessig's Code & Other Laws of
Cyberspace (New York, Basic Books 99) earlier in 2000.
An Intellectual
Capital article
around the same time characterised it as DOA, despite frantic efforts at
resuscitation.
Cookies
Wondering about the mechanics of tracking? Cookies
(New York, McGraw-Hill 1998), by Simon St Laurent, won't satisfy system
administrators and those who eat, drink and breathe code but in 500
pages offers an introduction to scripting, architecture and management
of the ubiquitous tools for tracking who's visiting sites.
In a recent West Virginia Journal of Online Law & Technology article
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger
examines cookies and privacy legislation, arguing that
companies who set them without consent may violate the
European Union Directive on the Protection of Personal
Data
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