Today I thought that I should discuss about the privacy invasion that is happening with the acceptance of the blockchain technology and what you need to be aware of to be safe. So please read the blog and learn the ways to protect yourself.
We live in the age of internet and are called the tech-savvy generation, the world is on our finger tips and we are always connected to the world, sometimes even at the most inauspicious of moments. We are passionate about what we do, we are finicky about the things we like and we love to share everything that we do the world. However, sharing everything to the world by exposing yourself to the internet can lead to a number of problems, one example that you all might remember is the hacking of the online site AshleyMadison.com which allowed users to search for people who wanted to have an extra-marital affair having the title :
Life is short. Have an affair.
My point being that whatever information that you put on the internet is not safe. This was already a point to worry about, but still if you had some private information of yours on the internet then you could at least try to get it off the internet by court order or some other way. But still you cant be sure that it is completely vanished, it is just may be a little more difficult to find.
But now we are slowly but surely stepping into the era of blockchain technology, with the technology being adopted by many countries around the world like. But as the technology grows with time and its acceptance grows the Right of people to be forgotten is getting lost as each day passes. This is essentially because in the blockchain technology the data which has been stored can not be changed which means that any personal data entered in the blockchain can not be deleted.
Steemit, the platform which we all love is a blockchain based social media platform, which means anything that I, you or anyone else for that matter has shared on this platform cannot ever be taken down. It's like our words are getting etched on the stone of blockchain for anyone to see even in the far off future. This could be a dangerous proposition for someone who in the future wants some of their information removed from the platform. So that person has lost their right to be forgotten.
In order to remove the data from the blockchain under a special circumstance, like if there is a court order to shut down a set of nodes which contains the required data. This would cause all the other data stored in those nodes to be removed as well with the targeted data. Given that these nodes that are to be shut down contains some critical data for someone else makes it nearly impossible to shut the nodes down. This means that practically the data that was to be deleted would continue to exist in order to prevent massive disruption to the provision of good data for other applications.
When a new data is entered in the blockchain, it is usually checked by the peers in the network so that any chances of fraud can be avoided by the rogue nodes. This means the data will be stored transparently in the blockchain for everyone to see.
Sometimes in order to verify if a transaction in the blockchain is valid or not personal data will be required. Bitcoin itself is an example of this, for a node to check a bitcoin transaction, it must have access to all previous transactions and be able to check that the person giving the bitcoins actually has them to give. It must therefore be possible for any node to reconstruct the full financial history of every person exchanging bitcoins: how many bitcoins they have, where they got those bitcoins from, whom they spend their bitcoins with.
This is highly personal information, revealing the details of someone's life and the only shield from this is that the bitcoin address might not be known by others. But this safety feature can easily be breached if that particular address is associated with a donate button on some blog. Those who trade bitcoins are therefore advised to hold several bitcoin addresses and not to transfer bitcoins between those accounts to avoid others linking them together. It’s not clear as to how many people holding bitcoin are actually aware of this risk.
There are ways to design the content of blockchains and the network that supports them that limit the level of disclosure that they entail.
Whereas anyone can join the Bitcoin blockchain, it is possible to use blockchains as a method of resolving conflicts within a peer-to-peer network of trusted nodes. When nodes can be trusted, they can control what becomes public, and therefore hide data in the blockchain that should not be shared. The security of all the nodes in such a trusted network needs to be guaranteed as every node will have a copy of all the relevant data, and the network needs to be protected against spoofing, but in general if you have a trusted network many privacy issues are no more problematic than they are in centralised systems.
Blockchains could be used purely to provide a timestamp for information held elsewhere. Content that could require redactions in the future can be made available as usual on the web, with transactions in the blockchain containing simply a pointer to the content and its hash. If the content needs to be taken down, the fact that the content existed at a given point in time could remain in the blockchain; the stored hash alone would not enable the reconstruction of the removed content. If the content needs to be changed, the existing hash would no longer match the content, so applications are able to detect that something has changed. If the changes are legitimate, the reasons for them could be stored in a later, overriding, transaction. This pattern of using blockchains purely as a timestamping mechanism and not as a data store has the additional benefit of being more likely to scale in the face of large amounts of data needing to be recorded.
It’s possible to encrypt data stored within the blockchain. The main problem with this approach is that if the decryption key for encrypted data is ever made public, the encrypted content is readable by anyone with that key; there is no way of encrypting the data with a different key once it is embedded within the blockchain. Conversely, if the key is ever lost, the data cannot be read. And there’s the problem of sharing the key for the data amongst all those who legitimately need to be able to read it.
Regardless of the approach taken to designing blockchains, every blockchain contains transaction data. That data needs to be designed so that it isn’t discursive in and of itself, which may be a tricky balance as that data might also be necessary to assess whether the transaction is valid and therefore prevent fraud or errors. Transactions should also be designed so that they can’t be used to add comments that might include personal data.
Blockchains aren’t necessarily bad for privacy; it all depends on how they are designed. Anyone experimenting in the area should be thinking through the implications. As the ICO’s guidance around privacy by design suggests, designers should be carrying out a privacy impact assessment or similar process up front, to ensure that the transparency of the information stored in the blockchain does not infringe on people's privacy. Unlike with other technologies, getting it wrong is really hard to reverse.
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