Blockchain technology and the GDPR: the beginning of a beautiful privacy whac-a-mole?

On the first day of the CPDP2019 at 10:30 we’ll have a fantastic panel on blockchain technology and GDPR.

https://www.cpdpconferences.org/cpdp-panels/blockchain-technology-and-the-gdpr-the-beginning-of-a-beautiful-privacy-whac-a-mole

• What are the main points of friction between blockchains and the GDPR?
• What are the technological privacy enhancing mechanisms that could apply?
• What are the appropriate and necessary conciliations for the creation of privacy-preserving blockchains in accordance with data protection regulation?
• Is there a market for non-compliance that blockchain technologies are best suited to serve?

The speakers include: Michèle Finck, Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition (DE); David Ciliberti, DG JUST (EU); Alexandra Giannopoulou, Blockchain and Society Policy Research Lab, Institute for Information Law, UvA (NL); George Danezis, UCL (UK); and Konstantinos Stylianou,
University of Leeds (UK). The panel will be moderated by Mireille Hildebrandt, VUB-LSTS (BE), and chaired by Balazs Bodo.

ABSTRACT: Individual user control of data has become a central issue in the European Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), creating a more demanding data protection framework for involved actors, all while coming in conflict with fundamental characteristics of blockchains. Thus, the difficulty lies in designing a system without compromising core values of both privacy regulation on the one hand and blockchain technology on the other. Given the right incentives there is no doubt GDPR compliant distributed ledgers can, and will be designed. The real question is what happens if there is persistent market/social/political interest in those blockchain implementations which do not care for, or are unable to achieve GDPR compliance. Considering the interdisciplinary nature of the main question, the proposed panel consists of invited experts selected to cover various privacy-related fields including law and computer science.