4 ms·

Well, yeah, there is a rather straightforward solution - just don't store any personal information on a blockchain. Is it practical? Sometimes yes. Some usecas

Well, yeah, there is a rather straightforward solution - just don't store any personal information on a blockchain. Is it practical? Sometimes yes. Some usecases won't be able to do that, and this is fine, they should just consider technologies other than a blockchain. Or if they really want to have blockchain, perhaps consider storing personal information in an external database with references to its fields on a blockchain. Possibly with a salted hash stored in a blockchain, so that it's possible to verify whether a value was changed. A matching checksum or an empty value (meaning a value removed due to GDPR requirements) would be fine. Edit: A removed comment suggested storing an encryption key in a database to decrypt data on a blockchain. This is another way of looking at it - essentially keep two parts, one on a blockchain, another outside of blockchain - and you need both to decode the data while the part outside of blockchain could be removed.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
marknadal 9y ago
Yes, I wish more people followed your advice... for anything, not just blockchain. If you don't want your personal information leaked, never post it anywhere, blockchain or not. Now, unfortunately, as you comment, this isn't necessarily always practical. So what do we do about that? Well, ugh! This is why buzzwords of "blockchain" like this article is trying to cash in on, are annoying. A blockchain does NOT have to be an immutable ledger, all a blockchain has to be is cryptographically signed/linked data. Sure, Bitcoin uses a blockchain that is computationally difficult to rewrite, and therefore for all practical purposes immutable, but it also isn't scalable for storing everybody's personal information. Instead, you can store people's personal information in a blockchain, and since they are the cryptographic holders of that key, they can null out their data if they want! This will actually make it easier to comply with the laws they reference, not harder, because people are self-sovereign over their own data and identity. In fact, we've already implemented a system like this, check it out at https://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-a-p2p-twitter-with-e2e-encryption-f90505b2ff8 https://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-a-p2p-twitter-wi... .

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

marknadal 9y ago

Yes, I wish more people followed your advice... for anything, not just blockchain. If you don't want your personal information leaked, never post it anywhere, blockchain or not. Now, unfortunately, as you comment, this isn't necessarily always practical. So what do we do about that? Well, ugh! This is why buzzwords of "blockchain" like this article is trying to cash in on, are annoying. A blockchain does NOT have to be an immutable ledger, all a blockchain has to be is cryptographically signed/linked data. Sure, Bitcoin uses a blockchain that is computationally difficult to rewrite, and therefore for all practical purposes immutable, but it also isn't scalable for storing everybody's personal information. Instead, you can store people's personal information in a blockchain, and since they are the cryptographic holders of that key, they can null out their data if they want! This will actually make it easier to comply with the laws they reference, not harder, because people are self-sovereign over their own data and identity. In fact, we've already implemented a system like this, check it out at https://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-a-p2p-twitter-with-e2e-encryption-f90505b2ff8 https://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-a-p2p-twitter-wi... .