Critics: P3P Debut A 'Step' Privacy from Companies6/22/2000; 8:55:02 AM "An Internet protocol designed to serve as an automatic privacy-protection agent appeared in a working software demonstration Wednesday after years of development and a near-death experience."'"If you read most (websites') privacy policies, there's nothing private about them. So now that we can encode those in a machine language, (that) hasn't fixed the privacy problem," Hill said. "All that means is bad privacy policies can now be written in a form that your computer can read."'I expect companies to snap this up and utterly neutralize it, just as they have neutralized the concept of posting privacy policies, as the quote above illustrates, by making them completely unreadable. Expect Internet Explorer to include P3P (Platform for Privacy Preferences) support as a hidden feature, difficult to use, and buggy. (Can you tell I have no faith in the data-gathering industry to regulate the data-gathering industry?)