The future of a key Web standard that would give consumers control over their online privacy hangs in the balance after news emerged that an entrepreneur will likely be awarded a set of patents on the technology.

Paper from the University of Miami School of Law discussing P3P, its potential benefits and pitfalls.

Early P3P Wired article talks about P3P and P3P issues from the WWW7 conference in Australia in March '98.

CNN.com article: Some companies are gradually implementing the proposed Platform for Privacy Preferences[...] But it remains unclear whether P3P will succeed as a standard.

Early P3P article discusses issues with the P3P policy and its development.

XML.com article. Claims of patent infringement and the potential implications for implementors of the W3C's Platform for Privacy Preferences framework

An overview of the W3C's new P3P protocol for implementing consumer privacy preferences. Includes discussion on Microsoft, I.E. 6 and online privacy for consumers.

What exactly is collected, shared and acted upon isn't always evident to end users. This may lead to trust problems between site visitors and site owners, resulting in loss of business and even legal problems.

Many of you wrote in to agree with me that the W3C's Platform for Privacy Preferences might be a far cry from an antidote to privacy woes.

Andy Oram article discussing P3P as a social protocol, as well as his views of the motivations behind the protocol.