Enhancing web privacy protection through declarative policies

The Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) is a W3C framework for web privacy management. It provides a stan-dard vocabulary that websites can use to describe their pri-vacy practices. The presence of website published P3P poli-cies enable users to congure web browsers to allow, block or warn users during access and data exchange with web-sites. It’s a good idea that unfortunately is rarely used. We identify three primary reasons: (i) the languages available to describe user privacy preferences are not sufciently ex-pressive, (ii) P3P policies published by websites are not trusted by users and (iii) P3P framework does not provide a coherent view of available privacy protection mechanisms to the user. Towards addressing these issues; we present en-hancements to the P3P framework. We use a more expres-sive policy language based on deontic concepts to describe users privacy-related policies, constraints and preferences. We introduce a new trust model for websites and describe its use in user privacy preferences. Finally, we present sample policies to demonstrate the relevance of our work and of-fer it as an effective starting point towards enhancing Web Privacy Protection. 1