Link Before You Share: Managing Privacy Policies through Blockchain

TL;DR

This paper presents LinkShare, a blockchain-based framework that automatically enforces and audits user privacy policies for sharing PII across third parties, enhancing control and transparency.

Contribution

It introduces a novel integration of Data Privacy ontology with blockchain to automate privacy policy enforcement and data flow tracking in a practical system.

Findings

Successfully implemented the LinkShare system

Demonstrated automatic privacy policy enforcement

Enabled transparent data flow tracking

Abstract

With the advent of numerous online content providers, utilities and applications, each with their own specific version of privacy policies and its associated overhead, it is becoming increasingly difficult for concerned users to manage and track the confidential information that they share with the providers. Users consent to providers to gather and share their Personally Identifiable Information (PII). We have developed a novel framework to automatically track details about how a users' PII data is stored, used and shared by the provider. We have integrated our Data Privacy ontology with the properties of blockchain, to develop an automated access control and audit mechanism that enforces users' data privacy policies when sharing their data across third parties. We have also validated this framework by implementing a working system LinkShare. In this paper, we describe our framework on detail along with the LinkShare system. Our approach can be adopted by Big Data users to automatically apply their privacy policy on data operations and track the flow of that data across various stakeholders.