The W3C has released a last call Working Draft of the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) after getting past a number of issues, including a patent that had been seen as threatening.

P3P 1.0 describes a set of technologies that let users determine how information supplied in a transaction may be used, with future development possibly leading to more sophisticated negotiation about such policies.. It adds a new policy header to HTTP, allowing servers to identify where information about their privacy policies may be found, as well as new usage for the HTML LINK element to perform a similar service without modifications to Web servers.

P3P specifies the grammar used for its policy descriptions using ABNF, but really describes an XML vocabulary. P3P 1.0 doesn't use XLink for its links, sticking with its own vocabulary for referencing external resources. Although RDF is often mentioned in association with P3P, RDF is not mentioned in this draft.

Last Call ends on 30 April 2000, a much longer time than has been common in prior W3C activity. Comments should be sent to the www-p3p-public-comments@w3.org mailing list.