Web Security, Privacy & Commerce, 2nd Edition

Simple P3P-Enabled Web Site Example

Many sites, including personal home pages and sites designed primarily to provide information (as opposed to those designed to sell things or provide interactive services), have very simple privacy policies. They tend to collect minimal amounts of data, and generally will either commit to using that data in very limited ways, or make no commitment that might limit future use of that data. Furthermore, for these simple sites one P3P policy is probably sufficient for the entire site.

Example C-1 is a policy reference file for a simple site named Example.Com that has one policy for the entire site. This policy reference file is placed at the well-known location (/w3c/p3p.xml). This file also includes the site’s P3P policy. The policy reference file and policy expiry are set to 10 days. The policy for this site also applies to all the cookies set by this site. Example.com keeps typical web logs. These logs are kept indefinitely and are used to diagnose problems with the web site. They are not shared with other companies; however, they are sometimes analyzed in order to gain insights into how people are using the web site.

Example C-1. A policy reference file for a simple site that includes an inline policy

<META xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/12/P3Pv1"> <POLICY-REFERENCES> <EXPIRY max-age="864000"/> <!-- 10 days --> <POLICY-REF about="#policy1"> <INCLUDE>/*</INCLUDE> <COOKIE-INCLUDE>* .example.com *</COOKIE-INCLUDE> </POLICY-REF> </POLICY-REFERENCES> ...