A Smart Contract-Based Dynamic Consent Management System for Personal Data Usage under GDPR

A massive amount of sensitive personal data is being collected and used by scientists, businesses, and governments. This has led to unprecedented threats to privacy rights and the security of personal data. There are few solutions that empower individuals to provide systematic consent agreements on distinct personal information and control who can collect, access, and use their data for specific purposes and periods. Individuals should be able to delegate consent rights, access consent-related information, and withdraw their given consent at any time. We propose a smart-contract-based dynamic consent management system, backed by blockchain technology, targeting personal data usage under the general data protection regulation. Our user-centric dynamic consent management system allows users to control their personal data collection and consent to its usage throughout the data lifecycle. Transaction history and logs are recorded in a blockchain that provides trusted tamper-proof data provenance, accountability, and traceability. A prototype of our system was designed and implemented to demonstrate its feasibility. The acceptability and reliability of the system were assessed by experimental testing and validation processes. We also analyzed the security and privacy of the system and evaluated its performance.