Sounds like you're talking about P3P, which at least is a ridiculous useless standard that I'm guessing most server operators copy-paste and tweak a http header without understanding it just to get IE to work as expected.
P3P is a small step in what I'm arguing would be the right direction, but I doubt anything like that would bring any significant improvement in general privacy standards unless it was widely supported (all major browsers), legally mandated (with meaningful enforcement against violations), and most important of all, able to adapt as technologies and the ethics of privacy evolve.
It needs to be able to capture the things that significant numbers of people care about and summarise the main types of behavior encountered on real world web sites, but in a way that everyday users can see and configure in a few moments in their browser. This is a tall order, of course, but even a decent attempt at it would probably be better than the utter contempt for privacy and blatant exploitation of users' ignorance that is widespread today.
As a benchmark, I suggest looking at the way organisations like Facebook have presented privacy settings. Non-technical people understand concepts like sharing data with everyone vs. limited audiences, or allowing their name/photo to be associated with something. Significant numbers of people do set these preferences, and do object when they are violated or when their "preferences" are changed for them. But the choices probably have to be explained and configured at that kind of level of simplicity or it'll all be too much for most people to bother with.
Comments
Sounds like you're talking about P3P, which at least is a ridiculous useless standard that I'm guessing most server operators copy-paste and tweak a http header without understanding it just to get IE to work as expected.
P3P is a small step in what I'm arguing would be the right direction, but I doubt anything like that would bring any significant improvement in general privacy standards unless it was widely supported (all major browsers), legally mandated (with meaningful enforcement against violations), and most important of all, able to adapt as technologies and the ethics of privacy evolve.
It needs to be able to capture the things that significant numbers of people care about and summarise the main types of behavior encountered on real world web sites, but in a way that everyday users can see and configure in a few moments in their browser. This is a tall order, of course, but even a decent attempt at it would probably be better than the utter contempt for privacy and blatant exploitation of users' ignorance that is widespread today.
As a benchmark, I suggest looking at the way organisations like Facebook have presented privacy settings. Non-technical people understand concepts like sharing data with everyone vs. limited audiences, or allowing their name/photo to be associated with something. Significant numbers of people do set these preferences, and do object when they are violated or when their "preferences" are changed for them. But the choices probably have to be explained and configured at that kind of level of simplicity or it'll all be too much for most people to bother with.