Cookies are a mixed blessing - combined with personal information they can be used to tailor the view an individual is presented with. Users should be able to turn cookies on and off. It was pointed out that the aims of advertisers is moving from simply displaying the advert to closing the transaction. A straw poll indicated that some of the audience never register with web sites, and some register using pseudonyms. Servers announce their intentions for processing of personal information in metadata, allowing the user to accept or reject them.
Several drafts are available from the web site, and there are two working groups on implementation.
User preferences can be configured to cover domains from a single site, through a group of sites, up to all sites. The privacy assertions would include cookie processing, making the cookie issue academic. A decision must be made to trust the accuracy of the privacy assertions - this is essentially the standard trojan horse problem. Privacy assertions can be signed by a third party as assurance, but they don't have to be. The user policy can specify whether assertions must be signed to be trusted.