The left pane of the P3P editor displays all of the data sets that you can declare in your policy. Data elements are displayed when you expand the data set to which it belongs. The editor provides the data sets and data elements from the P3P base data schema and categories. You can declare any of these elements as necessary, but they cannot be modified. You can, however, copy a base data element and modify it according to your needs. You can also create your own data elements and data sets in the left pane. None of the elements displayed in the left pane are declared in your policy until you move them into a data group in the right pane.
Before you work with the data elements, review the data groups available in the templates supplied by the editor. A brief description of each template is available in the Templates Help .
For each group of data that you collect, your policy must define the purpose (what the information is used for) and the recipient (who gets the information).
To create a group, right click the Groups pane of the editor window and select New Group from the context menu. The new group is displayed in the editor.
When you start with a blank policy, an empty group is already present in the Group pane. For this and any new groups that you create, give the group a unique and meaningful name and specify the purpose and the recipients of the data in the group.
Make sure you save your changes when you are finished with this task.
When a data element or data set is moved into a data group, it is declared as part of the policy and known as a policy element. To declare a data element, drag the element from the left pane into a data group in the right pane. You can put any data element into more than one group.
As explained in planning, data groups in a policy are distinguished by what the data is used for (purpose) and who uses the data (recipients). Therefore all data elements in a single group share these properties. This fact should guide how you arrange your data into groups.
After you create a policy element, verify that its properties are set correctly. To do this, right-click the element and select Properties .
If you declare the HTTP cookies data element, you can use a compact policy to enhance the performance of serving the policy. For more information about using compact policies, see the P3P Deployment Guide, which will be available at http://www.w3.org/P3P/ .