Machine–Readable Privacy Policies (P3P)

The Privacy Provisions of the E–Government Act of 2002 require agencies* to have both a "human readable" Privacy Policy and machine readable technology that automatically alerts users about whether site privacy practices match their personal privacy preferences. P3P is the standard for machine-readable Privacy Policy.

Resources

The Department of Commerce has created two presentations for their webmasters to help implement P3P requirements. You may want to adapt these for your own agency to train system administrators and others.

Implementing P3P (User) – Training presentation that can be used to instruct users on what preferences they must set in their browsers (HTML) | (Powerpoint)

Implementing P3P (Server) – Training presentation that can be used to instruct system administrators on what they must do to their servers (HTML) | (Powerpoint)

* These requirements apply to executive departments and agencies and their public websites. Check the specific law to see if it also applies to the judicial or legislative agencies or to intranets.

Page Updated: June 30, 2009