User-Controlled Privacy-Preserving User Profile Data Sharing based on Blockchain

The tremendous technological advancement in the last few decades has brought many enterprises to collaborate in a better way while making intelligent decisions. The use of Information Technology tools in obtaining data of people’s everyday life from various autonomous data sources allowing unrestricted access to user data has emerged as an important practical issue and has given rise to legal implications. Various innovative models for data sharing and management have privacy and centrality issues. To alleviate these limitations, we have incorporated blockchain in user modeling. In this paper, we constructed a decentralized data sharing architecture with MultiChain blockchain in the travel domain, which is also applicable to other similar domains including education, health, and sports. Businesses that operate in the tourism industries such as travel and tour agencies, hotels and resorts, shopping malls etc. are connected to the MultiChain and they share their user profile data via stream in the MultiChain. The paper presents the hotel booking service for an imaginary hotel as one of the enterprise nodes, which collects users’ profile data with proper validation and will allow users to decide which of their data to be shared thus ensuring user control over their data and the preservation of privacy. The data from the repository is converted into an open data format while sharing via stream in the blockchain so that other enterprise nodes, after receiving the data, can easily convert them and store into their own repositories. The paper presents an evaluation of the performance of the model by measuring the latency and memory consumption with three test scenarios that mostly affect the user experience. The node responded quickly in all of these cases building a better and more engaging user experience. The paper also proposes a concept of the smart contract in the form of the finite state in the expanding domain of privacy-preserving data sharing and management.

@article{Shrestha2018,
  title     = {User-Controlled Privacy-Preserving User Profile Data Sharing based on Blockchain},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {9},
  number    = {1},
  year      = {2018},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Ajay Kumar Shrestha and Julita Vassileva and Ralph Deters},
  doi       = {10.14569/SpecialIssue.2018.090103},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/SpecialIssue.2018.090103}
}