P3P Adoption on E-Commerce Websites: A Survey & Analysis

In order to maintain customer trust, E-commerce vendors have a strong incentive to protect customer privacy. In this paper, we examine whether this incentive translates into the adoption of the Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) in the e-commerce industry. Results from a web crawl in the sector will be presented to illustrate the current state of P3P adoption amongst different sectors of the Web; and how P3P interacts with other privacy enhancing technologies. We explore a potential explanation for our results by investigating P3P from the user’s viewpoint using “innovation diffusion theory”. These differing viewpoints are due to the symbiotic nature of P3P policies and their agents. In general, we find that P3P adoption is not increasing, and the current implementation seems to have serious shortcomings from a user’s perspective.