5.10 Declaring Privacy Level Via P3P
| Protection of individual privacy and ensuring the safety of personal information are becoming increasingly important on the Internet. XForms ”as the next generation of Web forms ”enables Web authors to declare the policies used to protect the information they collect via a standardized mechanism. This is enabled via model property p3ptype , based on Platform For Privacy Preferences (P3P [2] ), a W3c recommendation that enables Web sites to express their privacy practices in a standard format that can be retrieved automatically and interpreted easily by user agents. P3P user agents will allow users to be informed of site practices (in both machine and human-readable formats) and to automate decision making based on these practices when appropriate. Thus, users need not read the privacy policies at every site they visit.
Property p3ptype holds a value of type xsd:string that describes the kind of data collected by the associated instance data node, based on the P3P data type system. The P3P data type system helps reconcile among different names that might be used for the same piece of data. XForms' authors, deploying large scale Web applications, are encouraged to use this feature so that users are made aware of the policies used to protect their personal data. This will in turn encourage users to provide such information when appropriate.  |
