Towards an Accountable Web of Personal Information: The Web-of-Receipts

Abstract

Consent is a corner stone in any Privacy practice or public policy. Much beyond a simple ''accept'' button, we show in this paper that obtaining and demonstrating valid Consent can be a complex matter since it is a multifaceted problem. This is important for both Organisations and Users. As shown in recent cases, not only cannot an individual prove what they accepted at any point in time, but also organisations are struggling with proving such consent was obtained leading to inefficiencies and noncompliance. To a large extent, this problem has not obtained sufficient visibility and research effort. In this paper, we review the current state of Consent and tie it to a problem of Accountability. We argue for a different approach to how the Web of Personal Information operates: the need of an accountable Web in the form of Personal Data Receipts which are able to protect both individuals and organisation. We call this evolution the Web-of-Receipts: online actions, from registration to real-time usage, is preceded by valid consent and is auditable (for Users) and demonstrable (for Organisations) at any moment by using secure protocols and locally stored artefacts such as Receipts. The key contribution of this paper is to elaborate on this unique perspective, present proof-of-concept results and lay out a research agenda. INDEX TERMS Privacy, consent, accountability, web-of-receipts, personal data receipts.

Consent Receipts for a Usable and Auditable Web of Personal Data

“…In this, we advance the state of the art, as outlined in Section.III-C, by further providing a detailed analysis of requirements across disciplines and creating a concrete proposal for the socio-technical utilisation of consent receipts on the web. In addition to addressing the challenges identified in [17], we also demonstrate the relevance and applicability of legal and standardisation efforts (see Section.III) and its implications for consent and consent receipts. Finally, the three real-world applications of consent receipt validate their usefulness as -(1) a powerful tool for legal compliance as well as user empowerment; and (2) a technically and practically feasible solution for users and user-agents.…”

“…A receipt, if designed as a secure bearer token [17], provides a straightforward solution for both the service provider and the user to communicate and interact in a truly anonymous, but verifiable and secure, fashion. It decouples the identification and authentication problems from reusing sensitive identity information (such as ID cards) and instead provides a solution scoped to the context whereby the parties involved can determine their own methods for identity and identification.…”

“…Only by trusting the service records (the very ones in doubt and under investigation) can one know which privacy notice applied for a particular user at a particular moment in time. Receipts simplify this problem by explicitly requiring a link to the specific version of notice applicable at the time of consent interaction [17].…”

Cloud Solutions for Private Permissionless Blockchain Deployment

“…Among many other use cases such as financial platforms [15], online voting or even digital identity, Agarwal et al [1] tries adapting blockchain for CMS. The idea is not new and was introduced before the [41,9,40,21,7]. However, Agarwal et al focus is implementing a scalable system.…”

User-Controlled, Auditable, Cross-Jurisdiction Sharing of Healthcare Data Mediated by a Public Blockchain

“…Furthermore, since tokens can be revoked at any time with immediate effect, it promotes compliance with virtually all regulations. Thirdly, we reuse the notion of Personal Data Receipt from the Data Protection communities [17]. BRUE provides acknowledgement Receipts for all operations of the involved entities.…”