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. Consider all of the steps involved in the increasingly common processing, printing, distributing, and archiving a digital photo. After the user takes a digital image with a common digital camera, one site may be the point to which the photo is first uploaded, from there the user follows a link to another site that performs special image processing, after which the next site created prints, which are then delivered by yet another service to family members. Finally, yet another site may offer archival services for the photos. 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. Not yet, as the standard is only just being completed. P3P has been under development over the last two years at the World Wide Web Consortium in a design effort that has included software vendors, large commercial users, privacy advocates, and government data protection commissioners from around the world. With the standard definition nearly complete, we are now entering the testing and implementation phase.