Privacy Fox - A JavaScript-based P3P Agent for Mozilla Firefox

Website operators and visitors are both interested in effective communication of the privacy policies of a website. In practice, however, privacy policies are either too long and difficult for visitors to read through, or do not provide the information that visitors are looking for. Automated translation of P3P policies into human readable form is a promising solution. P3P is a W3C-defined standard for publishing privacy policies in XML. Its adoption is growing, especially amongst the most visited websites on the Internet. This paper describes Privacy Fox, a plug-in for the Mozilla Firefox web browser that translates the P3P policy of the site being visited into two forms: a short privacy notice that highlights the privacy practices that are of most interest to the visitor, and a standard, detailed translation of the entire P3P policy. The translations warn the user about incomplete or unsatisfactory policies.