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The Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) is a new privacy technology developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). P3P technology can be found within your Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) browser and provides you with the ability to make more informed choices about the use of your personal information online. Enabling certain areas of our site with this new technology is another way that HP is on the leading edge of protecting your privacy.
Microsoft IE6 is the first browser to support the new privacy standard. With P3P, you can configure your browser to automatically detect if a website collects personally identifiable information, uses that information to create user profiles, or allows visitors to opt-out of the data collection.
A P3P-enabled browser has preset options from which you can choose. Or you may customize your setting by answering questions such as, what kinds of data are you willing to share and what types of "cookie" files are you willing to accept. As you surf the Web, the software then determines whether your privacy preferences match a site's data collection practices.
The P3P-enabled browser places special emphasis on cookies. A cookie is a piece of text which resides on your computer's hard drive to allow a Web application to respond to you as an individual. By gathering and remembering information about your preferences, the Web application can tailor its operation to your needs, likes and dislikes. With a P3P-enabled browser, you can make selections based on whether you wish to accept various types of cookies such as session (temporary), permanent, within a given domain or outside it (third party), and with or without a special "P3P compact policy" file. A compact P3P policy describes the attributes of a given cookie.
At hpshopping.com, for example, we offer one cookie called "hpshopping." It is a permanent cookie designed to give those customers who choose to register with hpshopping.com a personalized experience, including a greeting and remembering your shopping cart. Customers can browse with cookies turned off, but you can purchase only if you accept the cookie.
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