P3P-enable services will enhance user control by putting privacy policies where users can find them, present policies in a form that users can understand them, and, most importantly, enable users to act on what they see in policies more easily. For ecommerce services and other Web sites, P3P can be used to offer seamless browsing experience for customers without leaving them guessing about privacy. Moreover, P3P will help ecommerce services develop comprehensive privacy solutions in the increasingly complex value chain that makes the commercial Web such a success. On today's Web, when a consumer buys a product or service from one Web site, completing the transaction may well involve numerous individual services linked together, each of which has some role in the ultimate delivery to the user and each of which has some responsibility for honoring the privacy preferences expressed by the user at the beginning of the transaction. Setting the stage where such flexible combinations of services can be offered to users requires widespread agreement on standards, including the means of communicating from one service to another about how personal information should be handled.
Standards have a vital role in the operation of the Web in general.
The Web is not run by any single organization, but it does enable people to share information around the world because everyone who operates a piece of the Web agrees to follow shared technical standards. In the same way as the HTML standard ensures that everyone who looks at a Web page will see it as the author intended it to look, regardless of what computer or software is used, the P3P standard will enable every user and site operator on the Web to communicate in a common language about privacy. With the standard definition nearly complete, we are now entering the testing and implementation phase. Our last step in finalizing the design of the standard is to host a series of interoperability testing events, one in June and one in September. We are encouraged that a number of large Web software developers as well as innovative smaller services have committed to implementing P3P in their products.