Yes I mean pull back the curtains on what your site does and how you resolve issues. By doing so you are disclosing to your visitors browser what information you are collecting through your cookies and if there is a problem how the visitor can contact you. By not doing so isn’t going to kill your web site in any fashion nor is there any requirements from anyone to do so as well. What may happen is some visitors may not be able to fully enjoy your site.

Disclosing your privacy policy is known as the

Platform for Privacy Preferences

(P3P) as recommended by the World Wide Consortium in 2002. P3P is a protocol that allows a web site declare the information it collects and how that information is used. This gives the visitors more control of their personal information while browsing the site with a P3P enabled browser (aka User Agent).

With the rampant use of tracking cookies to record demographics and surfing habits many surfers elect to turn of cookies. The P3P enabled User Agent seek to give back cookies to these users and even more control over data collection. The surfer sets their browser to allow this or that type of cookie information collection and from there the browser will either save or reject a web sites cookie based up the web sites P3P policy. P3P enabled User Agent can even show the web sites policy in readable format.

Actually building P3P policies is quite difficult. First there’s the whole explanation from the w3c P3P Reference of what the xml formats are needed. They also provide a validator once you are done P3P Validator. You also need a privacy policy page for your site also explaining what you collect and what you do with that information. There are several websites that you can have the necessary P3P files created and they don’t seem expensive.

Are these P3P important? I don’t know the answer to that as User Agent support seems to be spotty. I do know my site visitors are very important too me and that I want to ensure a good experience. So I have created the necessary files. In this day and age privacy is important and trustworthy sites.