A Blockchain Platform for User Data Sharing Ensuring User Control and Incentives

• Published in: Frontiers in blockchain 2020-10, Vol.3
• Main Authors: Shrestha, Ajay Kumar, Vassileva, Julita, Deters, Ralph
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: blockchain; data sharing; incentive; privacy; smart contracts; user modeling
• ISSN: 2624-7852; 2624-7852
• DOI: 10.3389/fbloc.2020.497985

We propose a new platform for user modeling with blockchains that allows users to share data without losing control and ownership of it and applied it to the domain of travel booking. Our new platform provides solution to three important problems: ensuring privacy and user control, and incentives for sharing. It tracks who shared what, with whom, when, by what means and for what purposes in a verifiable fashion. The paper presents a case study of applying the framework for a hotel reservation system as one of the enterprise nodes of Multichain which collects users' profile data and allows users to receive rewards while sharing their data with other travel service providers according to their privacy preferences expressed in smart contracts. The user data from the repository is converted into an open data format and shared via stream in the blockchain so that other nodes can efficiently process and use the data. The smart contract verifies and executes the agreed terms of use of the data and transfers digital tokens as a reward to the user. The smart contract imposes double deposit collateral to ensure that all participants act honestly. The paper also presents a performance evaluation of the new platform by analyzing latency and memory consumption with selected three test-scenarios and measuring the transaction cost for smart contracts deployment. The results show that the node responded quickly in all our cases with a befitting transaction cost.