Setting a Compact Privacy Policy with Django

Question

Hi,

How do I set a P3P compact privacy policy from Django so that IE accepts cookies from my site when the security settings are on HIGH - i.e. no cookies accepted unless there's a Compact Privacy Policy.

Cheers Guy

Answer 1

I don't know terribly much about p3p but I did a little digging and found this:

http://www.w3.org/TR/P3P11/#Well%5FKnown%5FLocation

You put the file at /w3c/p3p.xml

It looks as though p3p policies are similar to robots.txt files.

Additionally you can set p3p headers on all your pages if the robots.txt method isn't the way you want to go. That's a side-note, however, since you want the compact version which I'm assuming is the p3p.xml file.

Hope this helps get you on the right track.

Answer 2

Middleware is the preferred way to do things like this on an "every request" basis. For instance, here is a simple bit of middleware to add the same (example) P3P header to every response Django generates:

In settings.py:

P3P_COMPACT = 'policyref="http://www.example.com/p3p.xml", CP="NON DSP COR CURa TIA"'
MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES += ('myapp.middleware.P3PHeaderMiddleware',)

In myapp/middleware.py:

from django.conf import settings

class P3PHeaderMiddleware(object):
    def process_response(self, request, response):
        response['P3P'] = getattr(settings, 'P3P_COMPACT', None)
        return response

You could also get a similar effect in a single view by setting the P3P header in the response:

def my_view(request):
    response = render_to_response('my_template.html')
    response['P3P'] = 'CP="NON DSP COR CURa TIA"'
    return response

To expand on the topic a little bit, cookies and headers such as the P3P header are both sent at the same time, as part of the response; in fact, under the hood, cookies are set with another response header. You can see the cookie header using curl:

$ curl --head http://www.google.com/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2010 00:04:59 GMT
Expires: -1
Cache-Control: private, max-age=0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
Set-Cookie: PREF=ID=d2c09762c479f94e:TM=1263341099:LM=1263341099:S=oJby3NpU4RsRfuYa; expires=Fri, 13-Jan-2012 00:04:59 GMT; path=/; domain=.google.com
Set-Cookie: NID=30=kdKrd5e-u6Xs7cUe3p4eaNDtv6SO88uBL5v6_M1XMTSRmkh7okxrWLOm-l_uZdN37PxQIe4dBlekFFVCpTFXGyIDlUrz1hEwhgVLvXfIik_VeVWGmWzKbA5qu_Zq0sOi; expires=Thu, 15-Jul-2010 00:04:59 GMT; path=/; domain=.google.com; HttpOnly
Server: gws
X-XSS-Protection: 0
Transfer-Encoding: chunked