Abstract
After the European Union's new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) became applicable in May 2018, concerns about the legal compliance of public blockchain systems with rights guaranteed by GDPR have emerged, e.g., on the 'right to be forgotten'. In order to better understand how the blockchain sector sees the challenges raised by GDPR and how such their communications could influence their users, this paper reports our data-driven analysis of GDPR-related public online communications of blockchain developers and service providers. Our analysis covers 314 public blockchain systems, and two different online communication channels: legal documents including privacy policies, T&C (Terms and Conditions) documents and other similar legal documents published on systems' official websites and public tweets of their official Twitter accounts. Our analysis revealed that only a minority (86/314 ≈ 27.5%) of the investigated blockchain systems had covered GDPR at least once using one or both communication channels. Among the 86 systems, only 27 systems (8.6%) had at least one legal document that actually talks about GDPR for the corresponding blockchain system. We noticed a systematic lack of detail about why and how the GDPR compliance issue was addressed, and most systems made questionable statements about GDPR compliance. The results are surprising considering that the GDPR was enacted in 2016 and has been in effect since May 2018.
| Original language | English |
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| Title of host publication | 2020 IEEE International Conference on Decentralized Applications and Infrastructures (DAPPS) |
| Editors | Jie Xu, Stefan Schulte, Peter Ruppel, Axel Kupper, Divyesh Jadav |
| Place of Publication | United States |
| Publisher | IEEE, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers |
| Pages | 22-31 |
| Number of pages | 10 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9781728170220 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9781728169781 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 08 Jul 2020 |
| Event | 2nd IEEE International Conference on Decentralized Applications and Infrastructures: DAPPS 2020 - Virtual event, Oxford, United Kingdom Duration: 03 Aug 2020 → 06 Aug 2020 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/conhome/9123815/proceeding (Proceedings) https://web.archive.org/web/20200815055545/https://ieeedapps.net/ (Conference website) |
Publication series
| Name | Proceedings - 2020 IEEE International Conference on Decentralized Applications and Infrastructures, DAPPS 2020 |
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Conference
| Conference | 2nd IEEE International Conference on Decentralized Applications and Infrastructures |
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| Country/Territory | United Kingdom |
| City | Oxford |
| Period | 03/08/20 → 06/08/20 |
| Other | IEEE DAPPS 2020 will provide a high-quality forum for participants from research and industry. The conference will discuss key theories, algorithms, infrastructures, and significant applications for Decentralized Applications and Infrastructures (dApps), as well as emerging research topics. |
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