How to disable P3P in Joomla

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P3P is a protocol to publish your intent of your websites privacy policy. Now, letting the websites themselves provide the information and users trusting, or not trusting, into that brings the entire thing ad-absurdum. If you set the tool up to not accept cookies from a “bad”-policied website and it just does not provide P3P, or the wrong or incomplete P3P tags your tool will not help anything.

Anyway, Joomla implemented it and by default provides contradicting P3P tags (which may even be dangerous and put you at risk, as you publish wrong (summary) policy information – people, and lawyers, may actually take you by your word/P3P tags) [as discussed here].

To disable them (or – same places for configuration of course):

  • In Joomla >= 1.6:

    Go into your administration panel,

    into extensions -> plugins,

    search for p3p

    disable the System – P3P Policy plugin (or configure, if you want)

  • In Joomla 1.5:

    Actually, it is hard-coded. Bad idea!

    libraries/joomla/session/session.php, line 426; comment it out (or configure, if you want) [path-source, verified]