Privacy

What is P3P?
"The Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P), developed by the World Wide Web Consortium, is emerging as an industry standard providing a simple, automated way for users to gain more control over the use of personal information on Web sites they visit. At its most basic level, P3P is a standardized set of multiple-choice questions, covering all the major aspects of a Web site's privacy policies. Taken together, they present a clear snapshot of how a site handles personal information about its users. P3P-enabled Web sites make this information available in a standard, machine-readable format. P3P-enabled browsers can "read" this snapshot automatically and compare it to the consumer's own set of privacy preferences. P3P enhances user control by putting privacy policies where users can find them, in a form users can understand, and, most importantly, enables users to act on what they see."

What benefit is there in obtaining a P3P Policy?
Publishing a Privacy policy on your website doesn’t necessarily mean that the quality of information a site’s cookies can collect will be degraded; on the contrary in fact, it will actually improve the quality under many circumstances. If a user wishes to restrict the use of cookies on their system, they can still manually edit their global settings, however a website providing users with a privacy policy allows users greater flexibility customising settings on a per website basis. This means that if a user’s global settings do not allow the particular type of cookies that your site intends to use – they can view your privacy policy and decide whether or not to allow the information to be given out. Before, this was a much more cumbersome task with trust settings. If your site doesn’t have a Poicy – and the default global settings on the browser refuse.

On our most active sites, we started to receive more and more support emails regarding "not being able to login" and soon spotted that the trend was Microsoft Explorer 6.0 browsers. Our "no cookies" page offered them little help. We then introduced a P3P policy file to the web site, and changed our "no cookies" page to say;
Instructions for Internet Explorer V6.x (This site has a P3P Privacy Report)
a) Click View, then Privacy Report
b) Double Click http://www.mysite.com/ to view P3P Privacy Report
c) If happy with content of P3P Privacy Report click Option "Always allow this site to use cookies", then click OK

Not only did we stop getting complaint e-mails, we actually had e-mails saying thank you for installing the policy!

What is involved?
The developer or webmaster of your site will have to answer some questions regarding the use of cookies, and the information that is collected from your cookies.
Next the policy will have to be created and encompass any additional requirements you might have such as:

• Multiple Policies.
  A separate policy will be required for different aspects of a site (for example if you have a private and a public section which uses information in a different manner)
• Legal Disclaimers and other Documents.
  You have the option to create Legal Disclaimers, Contact pages, no cookies pages and any other pages that may be pertinent for your organisation

What will it cost?
Firstly, we need the necessary information. Once you (or your website administrator) have answered the necessary questions, we can then begin our tasks.

We charge on an hourly basis, allowing 2 hours for consultation, installation and testing of your policy – if the site is hosted in our Web Farm.
If your site exists on another ISP’s Web Farm, we will not charge for installation, however if our assistance is required to install the policy we will charge a consultancy charge.

So for a site that is hosted on our webfarm that requires only a basic P3P policy clients can expect to pay for two hours labour at their preferential client rate.

For a new client or a client with additional requirements, a free consultation and quote is available. Please e-mail for more information.