An Implementation of P3P Using Database Technology

The privacy of personal information on the Internet has become a major concern for governments, businesses, media, and the public. Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P), developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), is the most significant effort underway to enable web users to gain more control over their private information. P3P provides mechanisms for a web site to encode its data-collection and data-use practices in a standard XML format, known as a P3P policy [3], which can be programmatically checked against a user’s privacy preferences. This demonstration presents an implementation of the server-centric architecture for P3P proposed in [1]. The novel aspect of this implementation is that it makes use of the proven database technology, as opposed to the prevailing client-centric implementation based on specialized policy-preference matching engines. Not only does this implementation have qualitative advantages, our experiments indicate that it performs significantly better (15 30 times faster) than the sole public-domain client-centric implementation and that the latency introduced by preference matching is small enough (0.16 second on average) for real-world deployments of P3P [1].