Managing Gender Change Information on Immutable Blockchain in Context of GDPR

Abstract

The transgender community faces serious socioeconomic predicaments due to the discrepancy that its members face between their current gender expression and the assigned gender identity at birth. Even though, a considerable amount of work has been done to protect their basic human rights such as security, equality and social acceptance; trans people are still large victims of hate-related crimes. With general data protection regulation (GDPR) and other data protection laws and policies in place, now it is ever more important to protect the confidentiality of gender change information as well as to establish technical solutions that can prevent from inferring any sense of gender change from historical data. In this context, distributed ledger technologies such as blockchain present great opportunities for information integrity, security, privacy and access. However, at the same time provenance information extracted from immutable blockchain can be exploited to infer gender change. Addressing this paradox here, we propose recommendations for managing gender change information in the blockchain environment in the context of the present socio-political, legislative and technical challenges associated with gender change.

A Gap Between Blockchain and General Data Protection Regulation: A Systematic Review

“…Some of the papers proved the feasibility of the proposed system only theoretically. Moreover, the algorithm of the proposed system was not sufficiently investigated [32], [34], [35], [41], [55], [62], [63], [67], [68], [70], [71], and the performance was not analyzed through pilot construction [32], [35], [44], [55], [74], [75], [81], [87]. Therefore, we cannot be sure that their solution is feasible, except for some.…”

“…This allowed us to perform computations on anonymized data [56]. Moreover, the fully homomorphic encryption protocol allows mathematical operations to be performed on encrypted data [35], [58]. It is designated as a technical solution that complies with the GDPR by the DIN SPEC [2].…”

“…Solution Category [34], [35], [55] ZKP [36], [57] Encryption Anony- [56] Local differential privacy mization [58] Homomorphic Encryption [59] Quantum cryptography [32], [33], [42], [43], [45], [46], [60]- [62], [64], [67], [75], [79]- [81], [87], [90] Access control using smart contract [37], [38], [69]- [73] Access control using ABE [37], [38] ABE with overhead reduction [70] ABE embedded in consensus Access control [71], [73] ABE with revocation/overhead reduction [72] ABE with revocation [68] Proof of attributes [39] ACL [41] Unprocessed request pool [66] Private data transaction etc. [69], [72] Multi-chain tages of permissionless and permissioned types.…”

Blockchain: A Panacea for Trust Challenges In Public Services? A Socio-technical Perspective

“…Smart contacts can be deployed for access control and data handling. We recommend not adding any confidential data to the blockchain but only adding a commitment or a proof to the network [82]. For example, consider a scenario where LE has to request data from CH regarding an ongoing investigation.…”