Article

An analysis of P3P-enabled web sites among top-20 search results

Authors:

Lorrie Faith Cranor,

Abdur ChowdhuryAuthors Info & Claims

ICEC '06: Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Electronic commerce: The new e-commerce: innovations for conquering current barriers, obstacles and limitations to conducting successful business on the internet

Pages 197 - 207

https://doi.org/10.1145/1151454.1151492

Published: 13 August 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Search engines play an important role in helping users find desired content. With the increasing deployment of computer-readable privacy policies encoded using the standard W3C Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) format, search engines also have the potential to help users identify web sites that will respect their privacy needs. We conducted a study of the quantity and quality of P3P-encoded privacy policies associated with top-20 search results from three popular search engines. We built a P3P-enabled search engine and used it to gather statistics on P3P adoption as well as the privacy landscape of the Internet as a whole. This search engine makes use of a privacy policy cache that we designed to facilitate fast searches. Using a list of "typical" search terms taken from AOL users' queries, we examined the trends in privacy policies that are returned from queries to the AOL, Google, and Yahoo! search engines. We then compared these results to results compiled after using "e-commerce search terms" from Google's Froogle service. We examined the top 20 search results returned by each search engine for each of the search terms and found at least one result with a P3P policy for 83% of the typical search terms. Overall we found that these typical search terms yielded P3P adoption rates of 10%. This contrasts with adoption rates of 21% percent when searching for e-commerce terms. Examining the content of the policies, we discovered that a minority of sites engage in direct marketing with or without a way of opting out, and that even fewer sites share personal information with other companies. Finally, we outline ways to increase P3P adoption rates as well as decrease policy errors.

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cover image ACM Other conferences

ICEC '06: Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Electronic commerce: The new e-commerce: innovations for conquering current barriers, obstacles and limitations to conducting successful business on the internet

August 2006

624 pages

ISBN:1595933921

DOI:10.1145/1151454

Conference Chairs:
Mark S. Fox
University of Toronto, Canada
,
Bruce Spencer
National Research Council Canada

Copyright © 2006 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 13 August 2006

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ICEC '06 Paper Acceptance Rate 53 of 112 submissions, 47%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 150 of 244 submissions, 61%

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TDSC.2013.58
Reay IBeatty PDick SMiller J(2013)Privacy policies and national culture on the internetInformation Systems Frontiers10.1007/s10796-011-9336-715:2(279-292)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10796-011-9336-7
Lämmel RPek E(2013)Understanding privacy policiesEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-012-9204-118:2(310-374)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10664-012-9204-1
Bernsmed KNyre ÅJaatun M(2012)User Agents for Matching Privacy Policies with User PreferencesInternational Journal of Computer Theory and Engineering10.7763/IJCTE.2012.V4.506(451-458)Online publication date: 2012
https://doi.org/10.7763/IJCTE.2012.V4.506
Kojima TItakura Y(2012)Identity and Access Management Architectures with a Focus on User InitiativeDigital Identity and Access Management10.4018/978-1-61350-498-7.ch008(133-147)Online publication date: 2012
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Reay IBeatty PDick SMiller J(2012)Do You Know Where Your Data Is?Cyber Crime10.4018/978-1-61350-323-2.ch511(1193-1219)Online publication date: 2012
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Olurin MAdams CLogrippo L(2012)Platform for privacy preferences (P3P)Proceedings of the 2012 Tenth Annual International Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust (PST)10.1109/PST.2012.6297943(217-220)Online publication date: 16-Jul-2012
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Afiqah Ahmad Said Hussin ADahlan HHossein Pour M(2012)Privacy policy preference (P3P) in e-commerce: Key for improvement2012 International Conference on Information Retrieval & Knowledge Management10.1109/InfRKM.2012.6205030(177-181)Online publication date: Mar-2012
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