Achievement

Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) compact policies (CPs) are a collection of three-character and four-character tokens that summarize a website's privacy policy pertaining to cookies. User agents, including Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) web browser, use CPs to evaluate websites' data collection practices and allow, reject, or modify cookies based on sites' privacy practices. CPs can provide a technical means to enforce users' privacy preferences if CPs accurately reflect websites' practices. Through automated analysis we can identify CPs that are erroneous due to syntax errors or semantic conflicts. We collected CPs from 33,139 websites and detected errors in 11,176 of them. Unless regulators use their authority to take action against companies that provide erroneous machine-readable policies, users will be unable to rely on these policies. See http://www.cylab.cmu.edu/research/techreports/2010/tr_cylab10014.html