privacy.txt is last weekends project. It’s a simple idea. I’m currently putting together a parser in PHP. I also want to see about implementing browser plugins for this as well. A little plugin that will sit and run in your browser and make a request for privacy.txt on a page it visits, and alerts you if the site has a privacy.txt file.
I also put the project up on Drumbeat, Mozilla’s new project site, as well as posting it to Forrst to get feedback. Anyways, I’m posting it here to get additional feedback from all my one reader. Let me know what you think.
The site says “Browsers currently have no mechanism to auto-discover privacy policies,” yet IE has supported P3P since ages.
Forgive me. I wasn’t aware of P3P. I’ll have to amend this and review P3P further. However, at my initial glance, it seems it requires quite a bit of work to get it up and running. privacy.txt is much simpler to implement, and has no impact on a website or web application, whereas P3P does. Furthermore, P3P looks very, very cumbersome.
I’m glad, however, to see others want something like this in place.
Again, key strengths to privacy.txt are the human readable, machine readable, easily discovered, and zero-impact on the site itself.
Nothing against your new initiative (especially since it seems that only IE has ever supported that P3P standard, and the only outcome of that was that dreaded stop-eye icon plaguing legitimate applications), just correcting factual errors. Also you might want to take a look at the feature set of that spec and their reasoning for providing alternative mechanisms for specifying the policy.
Yep, a lot of reading to do. Even if privacy.txt doesn’t take off in it’s current form, getting some form of discussion on privacy is important, I think. And something that doesn’t rely on asking what Facebook or Google are going to do about it.
Thanks so much for sharing