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Layers of privacy in the blockchain: from technological solutionism to human-centred privacy-compliance technologies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2022

Pablo Marcello Baquero
Pablo Marcello Baquero*
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor, HEC Paris, France
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: baquero@hec.fr
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Abstract

Different organisations recently published reports identifying the challenges and potential solutions to ensure privacy in blockchain platforms. The proposed solutions frequently emphasise the role of privacy-compliance technologies to be incorporated into the blockchain design. Often, these solutions imply a techno-regulatory approach, ignoring that the level of privacy implemented in a blockchain involves legal and policy choices, disregarding the need to implement human participation and contestability in these platforms. Against this backdrop, this paper proposes to examine how privacy-compliance technologies can incorporate human participation and contestability: first, resorting to the interdisciplinary literature to examine how technological design could balance privacy with human oversight; second, discussing the challenges to ensure ex post contestability for aggrieved data subjects; third, examining the difficulties in identifying liable parties in a blockchain platform. The current disregard of the social and human element risks undermining the role of privacy-compliance technologies in the blockchain.

Keywords

blockchaindata protectionprivacy compliance technologieshuman-centred technologies
Type
Special Issue Article
Information
International Journal of Law in Context , Volume 19 , Special Issue 1: Algorithmic Law in Context , March 2023 , pp. 51 - 69
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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