Steve Lucas, the senior VP government relations and CIO at infomediary PrivaSeek Inc attended the advisory committee of the World Wide Web Consortium that was held at the start of last week. And while he says he is glad that the organization is addressing the issues of privacy and intellectual property protection, he says he heard nothing that he hadn’t heard before. The W3C does not divulge the proceedings of its advisory committee meetings, which are held twice a year.
Lucas, who was there representing various companies, says he wasn’t impressed at all by the discussion of privacy issues and says he did not hear enough to recommend to clients that they should implement the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P). That’s the nascent standard that the W3C is developing that is supposed to enable web site owners to tell users about privacy practices and let users control what information they disclose to a site and how it may be used. The W3C is coordinating a search for prior art to refute a patent claim lodged by Intermind Corp over parts of the P3P specification (05/04/99). The next W3C meeting is scheduled for November.
