The essence of P3 is specification and demonstration of the interaction between a site's privacy practices an d a user's privacy preferences. The P3-driven toolkits will come from any of the heavyweight software vendors that populate W3C's P3 Working Group roster. Firefly Software Corp., IBM Corp. Microsoft Corp., Netscape Communications Corp. and VeriSign are on this list and have paid to be a part of the consortium.

The consumer portion of the P3 preference setup is fairly simple because it will be part of the browser, says Philip DesAutels, W3C's project manager for digital signatures and intellectual property rights. Consumers can set up overarching personal profiles in the browser settings, which includes a list of personal data any given Web site is allowed and not allowed to collect. For instance, a consumer may indicate that no one is allowed to track his or her click-stream (links that got the surfer to the Web site in question). If this consumer surfs to a Web storefront that collects cli ck-stream data, says DesAutels, a dialog box will likely pop up saying that this site's practices do not jibe with the consumer's preferences. "The consumer will be able to override the default setting and visit the site anyway, or just move on," DesAutels says. Or, depending on the sophistication of the site's own programming, the consumer can negotiate a compromise between the consumer's preferences and the site's automatic offerings.

At first glance, P3 sounds like a seamless, efficient, automated mechanism that essentially creates a consumer-storefront interaction contract on the fly, but many obstacles still loom large. The biggest one: How exactly will practical implementation work on the Web storefront side? Another would be determining precisely which Web site practices will have to be posted. Even some of the P3 working group vendor members say the P3 platform raises more questions than answers.

"The P3 standard is all well and good, but just because there's a way to create privacy policies doesn't really do any good unless it's implemented in a meaningful way by the network managers or Webmasters at com panies with Web storefronts," says Tara Lemmey, a vendor member of the working group and CEO of Narrowline, an electronic commerce software company in San Francisco. "Firefly, Microsoft and Netscape, in particular, are going forward fast, but there will be a lot of noise about how this stuff will come out in commercial toolkits and then how companies can and must use it."

One thing is certain, however: The onus of taking this P3 standard guideline--however the software program eventually manifests itself--and creating Web store-consumer interaction guidelines that won't inhibit electronic commerce falls squarely on the shoulders of network managers.

The days are numbered until network managers (and Webmasters, for that matter) face two enormous tasks: They must first talk to their corporate execs about what they want to institute as Web storefront-consumer interaction policies; and then they must do the programming work once the promised toolkits materialize.