User Agent Support
Microsoft Internet Explorer is the only mainstream web browser that supports P3P. Other browsers have not implemented it due to the perceived lack of value it provides. IE provides the ability to display P3P privacy policies, and compare the P3P policy with your own settings to decide whether or not to allow cookies from a particular site. However, the P3P functionality in Internet Explorer extends only to cookie blocking, and will not alert you to an entire web site that violates your privacy preferences. Users who wish to use a full P3P user agent should use the AT&T Privacy Bird, which is now maintained by Carnegie Mellon's Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory.
Mozilla supported some P3P features for a few years, but all P3P related source code was removed in the mid 2000s.
The Privacy Finder service was also created by Carnegie Mellon's Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory. It is a publicly available "P3P-enabled search engine." A user can enter a search term along with their stated privacy preferences, and is then presented with a list of search results which are ordered based on whether the sites comply with their preferences. This works by crawling the web and maintaining a P3P cache for every site that ever appears in a search query. The cache is updated every 24 hours so that every policy is guaranteed to be relatively up to date. The service also allows users to quickly determine why a site does not comply with their preferences, as well as allowing them to view a dynamically generated natural language privacy policy based on the P3P data. This is advantageous over simply reading the original natural language privacy policy on a web site because many privacy policies are written in legalese and are extremely convoluted. Additionally, in this case the user does not have to visit the web site to read its privacy policy.
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