Thread:Support/About MediaWiki:Centralauth-centralautologin-p3p-explanation/hi/reply (3)

Firstly: It's technical because it's the explantion for a technical thing that isn't visible to most end users.

Secondly: In order for CentralAuth to be able to set cookies the way it needs to in Internet Explorer, we have to serve the page with a P3P header in the HTTP response. But putting in a correct P3P header might possibly have legal implications, and while it's fine if someone actually wants to spend the time to construct one and set the proper configuration variable we can't do it automatically.

On the other hand, we can follow the lead of Google and Facebook in supplying a P3P header that says "This is not a P3P policy! See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:CentralAutoLogin/P3P for more info.", which works just as well for the default configuration in current versions of Internet Explorer. So that's what we do.

Thirdly: It is meant to be human readable, although we don't expect anyone to actually find and read it. The only place that special page is linked from is in the HTTP response headers, so it's unlikely most users will discover it.