How does P3P define first-party and third-party Web sites?
While there are many positive aspects to the P3P privacy tool, the rigid definition of first-party and third-party sites may create serious problems for users and site sponsors. According to the P3P specification as published by the World Wide Web Consortium (and consistent with privacy laws and the common understanding of Internet users) first-party and third-party Web sites are defined as follows: • First-party sites are those owned or controlled in common by one company. However, in IE6 release, the P3P software looks for an exact match on minimal domain name before it will classify sites as first-party sites with regard to each other. For example, while most users would think of www.citifinancial.com and www.citifinancial.ca to be first-party sites, IE6 considers them to be third-party sites with respect to each other. Since many companies use different domain names, different servers to enhance performance and third-party proprietary content to enrich sites, P3P, in its current fo
