Page 24 - DIY Magazine June 2018

TO BE TRULY COMPLIANT WITH GDPR, USE A BLOCKCHAIN THAT FACILITATES THE ‘RIGHT TO BE FORGOTTEN’
Dominic McCann
CEO of BTL Group
The ‘right to be forgotten’ – a key element of the
new GDPR regulation that has been dominating the news agenda for much of the past few months; As of Friday 25th May 2018, anyone should be safe in the knowledge that if they ask any organisation to have their personal data deleted, that organisation does so and if requested, can provide proof of such a deletion.
This means even if you are standing in the queue to buy a Happy Meal from McDonald’s, you can ask to see
the footage from the security camera records that have filmed you and request that they it is deleted from their systems.
In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica and Facebook debacle, how can individuals be truly satisfied that their data has been eradicated when requested. BTL recently judged a hackathon at the Consensus blockchain conference in New York, where we challenged developers to build applications on our Interbit platform that can delete data.
We had teams that opted to use Interbit purely on
the basis that they can build applications that allow data stored on our blockchains to be permanently erased. One such application was for predicting sports outcomes for betting purposes, where users could build betting profiles and be ranked according to their performance.
But blockchain’s immutable attribute means that any data stored on a chain cannot be deleted. This is particularly the case with public or open blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Business requires blockchain technology to be more flexible and so we have built Interbit to be able to specifically meet GDPR’s requirement of the ‘right to be forgotten’.
In fact, we would go as far as to say that you can only truly meet this requirement with such a blockchain solution. If we look back at our betting profile application that was built at Consensus, if a user wishes to leave the
service, their entire profile and history could be deleted due to the way Interbit allows data to be segregated across multiple chains within single applications. Delete a chain, data is gone, for good.
So you can only be assured of deletion of data if the chain that data that is stored on is erased. A succinct and concise explanation of how our Interbit platform works is provided by the IT industry analyst Jason Bloomberg who writes: ‘BTL’s architecture is like no other I’ve seen, and it is the only one that succinctly deals with the GDPR ‘right to be forgotten’ requirement: to forget a user, simply delete their blockchains’ – click here to read his article.
It is no surprise that privacy is such a contentious issue at the moment. Recent research we commissioned highlights just this where 279 technology professionals in the UK and US said that ‘data privacy’ was their highest priority right now, ahead of ‘business operations’ and even ‘revenue growth’.
DIY Investor Magazine | Jun 2018 24