Link before you share: Managing privacy policies through blockchain

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. We have developed a novel framework to automatically track details about how a user's PII 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.