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Can blockchain help with our privacy problems?

Blockchain technology could potentially limit the impact of this erosion of privacy, while still releasing personal information when it’s more useful. For instance, the user could store personal information on a blockchain and release parts of it temporarily to receive services. Bitcoin and other blockchain-based on the digital currencies have demonstrated that trusted and transparent computing is possible using a peer-to-peer decentralized network and a public ledger. Privacy concerns about the Internet has been around since it broke into the mainstream from the academic world.

How Can Blockchain Help with Protecting Personal Privacy? 

Blockchain observers and enthusiasts see more resource that could become an alternative to things such as passwords and usernames in the blockchain. Imagine a blockchain in the future that provides every single Internet user in the world with a digital identity.

One that is encrypted, secure, and unalterable without the user’s consent. And this identity certificate will give you access to everything from your Gmail account to your medical records. The same blockchain would keep tracking your data and storing it. Because the blockchain architecture is all about safety or inalterability, all that data would remain safe and secure at all times. And that’s the theory. Personal privacy aided by blockchain could look like that in the future.

Privacy vs. Protection

If they are going to talk about using the blockchain as the foremost tool to protect privacy, then the first thing for us to understand is that privacy and protection are two very different notions. So, let’s try to come up with working definitions for both.

Privacy

Privacy refers to your ability to decide what information other digital parties can collect about you. For instance, are you ok with a website analyzing the type of songs you are listening to each and every day? Or figuring out what your favorite pasta brand is by analyzing your shopping decisions? What rights should you have to determine all that?

Protection

Protection comes next. Once that privacy-related information is out there in somebody’s database, what is the database owner doing to make sure that it’s secure and that it won’t end up in the hands of hackers, third parties, or the government? Privacy is a user right (not that it’s very respected by everybody, but it’s, in principle). Protection is a duty that those who conduct data gathering (not that they honor it so often, either, but, again, it’s principle) are supposed to observe, if only because It is best interest. So the coin has two sides: privacy and protection, and both are crucial. Blockchain technology is excellent at one, but not with the other one.

A user wants the option to delete a bit of data about himself that the blockchain stored previously. He can’t. The blockchain’s databases, ledgers and other digital objects can’t be altered retrospectively. A blockchain’s memory is perfect because its history has a copy in every node in the network. In the words of Douglas Adams, “once that something happens, it stays happened. So how much of an advantage is this perfect blockchain memory? Well, it already flies in the face of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. This legislation places the right of every user to be “forgotten” as an essential priority.