White House admits to web privacy gaffe

Just hours after endorsing a US industry initiative aimed at protecting online privacy, the White House has admitted that one of its own sites may be violating federal privacy policy.

The White House was one of 30 organisations on Wednesday that lent their support to the World Wide Web Coalition's (W3C's) Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P). P3P is the standard body's first technology to address privacy on the web.

P3P is a set of specifications that allows websites to express their privacy policy in XML - the language commonly used for ecommerce transactions. P3P-compliant browsers enable end users to decide what personal information they are willing to share with other websites, and how that information can be used.

As users surf the internet, their browser automatically compares their stated preferences to the sites' privacy policies, and alerts them as to what those policies are.

But soon after the announcement, Joe Lockhard, a spokesman for President Clinton, admitted that the website belonging to the White House's anti-drug unit may be gathering personal information about visitors without their knowledge.

"White House officials [have learnt] for the first time from the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) about certain practices by ONDCP contractors that could result in the collection of information about consumers and their internet use," he said in a statement.

Lockhard added that the practices would be stopped, and claimed that the ONDCP had never requested or received personally identifiable information from cookies, and that any such data would be destroyed. A cookie is a small piece of information that an http server sends to users' browsers when they connect to it for the first time so that it remembers them during subsequent visits.

The incident was particularly embarrassing to the White House as last month the Federal Trade Commission sought greater regulatory power from Congress to police commercial websites' privacy policies, arguing that self-regulation is ineffective.

The Clinton administration has withheld approval and urged the industry to take action.