UMBC Technical Report, TR-CS-04-13

Enhancing P3P Framework through Policies and Trust

Pranam Kolari, Li Ding, Lalana Kagal, Shashidhara Ganjugunte, Anupam Joshi, and Tim Finin

September 9, 2004

The Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) is a W3C standard that websites can use to describe their privacy practices. The presence of P3P policies enables users to configure web browsers to constrain what they can and cannot do when visiting websites. It's a good idea that, unfortunately, is rarely used. We identify two reasons: (i) the languages available to define a user's privacy preferences are not very expressive, and (ii) most websites do not have published P3P policies. We present enhancements to the P3P framework that uses trust and the Semantic Web concepts to solve these problems. We use the RDF-based Rei policy language to enable users to describe their privacy-related constraints and preferences. Further, our approach is effective even in the absence of published P3P policies through the incorporation of our trust model. We present use cases to demonstrate the relevance of our work to the current web privacy landscape and offer it as a powerful enhancement that can promote P3P's adoption and use.

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Tags: p3p, policy, privacy, semantic web, trust, web

Type: TechReport

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