FRAMINGHAM (12/08/2003) - IBM Corp. has submitted a draft of its Enterprise Privacy Authorization Language to the World Wide Web Consortium to develop. IBM is turning EPAL over to the W3C in the hope that it will be turned into a standard that will help automate privacy management tasks, improve consumer trust and reduce the cost of privacy compliance, the company said. EPAL is a programming language based on XML that will let software developers build security policy enforcement features directly into enterprise software applications. Using EPAL, personal data could have policies attached to it as it moves from application to application within a company. IBM introduced EPAL in July as a way to move beyond user identity-based security. The standard builds upon existing privacy specifications such as the Platform for Privacy Preferences, which the W3C released in April 2002. The W3C said the organization was "pleased to receive the EPAL Submission" from IBM.
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