At the start of this new year, the Data Rights Protocol (DRP) team at Consumer Reports’ Innovation Lab has been reflecting on the solid progress of the previous year and envisioning where this momentum will take us in 2024.
This past year saw the release of three DRP builds. In February, we released v0.7, which greatly enhanced the overall security of the protocol. In addition to utilizing Ed25519 signatures implemented by libsodium, v0.7 expanded the types of data that get cryptographically signed to encompass the full data rights request (i.e. encrypting both the identity of the consumer and the agent submitting the request).
In June, we leveraged these improvements to successfully conduct the first live end-to-end test of Data Rights Protocol v0.8, with Transcend, a privacy infrastructure provider and founding member of the Data Rights Protocol. This test marked the first ever cryptographically secure exchange of rights requests between two different implementations of the DRP.
By September, the team was ready to launch v0.9: the first stable version of the protocol equipped with all of the security features and enhancements from the prior builds. The DRP consortium also launched the new datarightsprotocol.org website with FAQs, links to the code repository, as well as a blog where you can find all of our updates.
We’re grateful to the consortium of DRP implementers for their participation to help standardize and simplify the process of advancing consumers’ privacy rights. We’d also like to recognize Dazza Greenwood (Protocol Lead) and Ryan Rix (Privacy Engineer) for their relentless efforts to translate the vision of standardized, streamlined, and secure data rights requests into the reality of operating principles, governance practices, and thousands of lines of code. Following two years of day-to-day management of the Data Rights Protocol initiative and consortium, both Dazza and Ryan have stepped into advisory roles.
In 2024, Lead Engineer John Szinger and Industry Relations and Operations Lead Houman Saberi will focus on broadening the reach and impact of the DRP. We’re excited to continue testing and maturing the DRP in partnership with consortium members, and will be sharing more about our testing roadmap soon.
We’ll also be working hard on streamlining and automating the DRP onboarding process to make it as efficient as the DRP itself. By testing the protocol and honing our systems we will ensure that the DRP is ready for its v1.0 release.
Curious if Data Rights Protocol is right for your company? You can read up on the reasons why here, check out our website and spec, or feel free to drop us an email at datarightsprotocol@cr.consumer.org to learn more. We look forward to hearing from you this year!
