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Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P)

A Research Project in Cooperation with the Distributed Systems Group

Security and Privacy will be of prime concern in a world of highly interconnected, autonomous smart devices that will eventually permeate our everyday lives, effectively placing us under constant surveillance. This prompts the needs for a privacy-aware infrastructure that is able to keep track of any ongoing data exchange, while providing the user with a single powerful interface to selectively manage such collected personal information. Under the auspices of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), our group participates in the creation of P3P (The Platform for Privacy Preferences Project), an emerging world-wide standard for defining data collection practices in a machine-readable manner, which can then be automatically compared to the individual privacy preferences of the user.

While P3P 1.0 is targeted towards Web privacy, work is already underway to broaden the scope of P3P to include for example also Web services. In our group we are particularly interested in applying P3P to ubiquitous computing environments. Using a trusted personal device, sensitive information can be exchanged with the environment only if the recipient matches the user's privacy preferences.

This project ended in April 2002.

Selected Publications

See the Publications of the Distributed Systems Group page for a full listing of our publications.

Related Student Projects

The following table lists corresponding student projects in our group. Note that some descriptions will be in German.

TypeTitleStudentSupervisorSemester
S A P3P Compliance Test Suite Nathalie KocherMarc LangheinrichSS 02
D Design und Implementation eines APPEL Editors Phyrum TeaMarc LangheinrichSS 01
ETH ZurichDistributed Systems Group
Last updated January 1 1970 01:00:00 AM MET ko