Your privacy...
we
need nothing of yours
Terms -
This site contains
summaries of copyrighted material for which reprint permission has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. We make these
information available in an effort to educate our visitors on the
broad range of issues impacting their lives and society in general. We
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material
as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance
with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is
distributed without profit for the purposes of criticism, comment,
news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and/or research,
For more
information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode
Your Privacy - Although your
ISP and crawlers collect and maintain all of you internet "history"
for usually three years.. we do not need or want any of your personal
information what so ever.
Privacy
is the ability of an individual or group to stop information about
themselves from becoming known to people other than those they choose
to give the information to. Privacy is sometimes related to anonymity
although it is often most highly valued by people who are publicly
known. Privacy can be seen as an aspect of security and one in which
trade-offs between the interests of one group and another can become
particularly clear.
Privacy
may be voluntarily sacrificed, normally in exchange for perceived
benefits, but often with little benefit and very often with specific
dangers and losses. An example of voluntary sacrifice is entering a
competition; a person gives personal details (often for advertising
purposes), so they have a chance of winning a prize. Another example
is where information voluntarily shared is later stolen or misused
such as in identity theft.
Overview of P3P
As the
World Wide Web became a genuine medium in which to sell products and
services, Electronic commerce websites tried to collect more
information about the people who purchased their merchandise. Some
companies used controversial practices such as tracker cookies to
ascertain the users' demographic information and buying habits, using
this information to provide specifically targeted advertisements.
Users who saw this as an invasion of privacy would sometimes turn off
HTTP cookies altogether, or use anonymous proxy servers to keep their
personal information secure.
The
Platform for Privacy Preferences Project, or P3P, is a protocol
designed to give users more control of their personal information when
browsing Internet Websites. P3P was developed by the World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C) and was officially recommended on April 16, 2002.
Criticisms
The
Electronic Privacy Information Center has been critical of P3P and
believe it will make it too difficult to protect a user's privacy [2]
(http://www.epic.org/reports/prettypoorprivacy.html). P3P is relying
on each individual website to be honest with its policy files, as
P3P-enabled browsers are unable to physically test that the site's
privacy policy actually functions as advertised.
As
people become comfortable with P3P it may be limiting the perceived
need of related privacy legislation.
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