PRM employs an electronic content distribution business model for the representation of privacy rights. The paper justifies PRM investment in ROI, standards, compliance, political and social benefit terms. PRM involves an extension of the Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology. DRM is widely used for metering and tracking content delivery. While DRM technology itself has been considered by many to be a risk to privacy, the same architecture offers significant potential for the distributed management of personal data.
Recent moves in DRM privacy by Hewlett-Packard Laboratories are indicative of US privacy efforts in any area, sharing as they do the ideological root of individual self-determination. This ideology is incompatible with the balanced European philosophy of data privacy as embellished in Directive 95/46/EC. PRM's promise is the potential for a widespread compliance with this Directive.
As such, PRM may draw on US work as a compliment to its functionality, rather than as a substitute. A PRM architecture is developed which demonstrates manageable switching costs from DRM architectures. Making this possible is the development of extensions to the Extensible Rights Markup Language (XrML).
The result is a prescription of requirements, solutions and imperatives for the adoption of PRM as a new paradigm for achieving data protection compliance in the distributed multi legal entity data management that is electronic commerce.