The age of rapid development of information technology allows giants such as Facebook and many other companies to earn billions of dollars by selling customers' personal information. The Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is an excellent solution for centralized systems. However, experts argue that distributed data storage systems should not be regulated by such a Regulation.
Companies have access to personal data stored on their central servers. They can keep this data forever or sell it to third parties.
However, on May 25, 2018, when the new European Union Privacy Regulation comes into force, EU citizens will have exclusive rights to their personal data and will be able to request its complete removal from the databases of the companies that own it.
Blockchain technology is the safest, most transparent and immutable information storage system available today. Data stored on the blockchain cannot be edited, sold to third parties, or deleted. Once information gets onto the blockchain, it stays there forever. And this is why the Data Protection Regulation is not suitable for companies using blockchains, since they will not be able to adhere to it.
“Modifying data on the blockchain is very difficult. If you want to delete data, you will not only need to change that part of the data, but also the hash block containing the data and all subsequent blocks,” says Oxford University lecturer Michelle Fink.
The point of the Data Protection Regulation is to give people the right to decide how their data is treated by centralized systems. Distributed data storage technology itself is confidential because information is stored in encrypted formats on a blockchain, giving the owner maximum control over it.
It is therefore safe to say that if all firms in Europe adopted blockchain technology, then there would be no need to apply the Data Protection Regulation, because such protection would already be provided by a reliable system.
Winston Maxwell, Data Protection Lawyer at Hogan Lovells believes that it is necessary to adapt the Regulations so that it provides an exception for blockchain technology. Europe has been actively using both blockchain technology and cryptocurrency for a long time. If the Data Protection Statement is not amended, it could completely destroy the concept of a distributed ledger..
The EU should either adapt the Regulation or abandon it and develop a new law obliging companies to use only blockchain systems, since such systems have been proven to be more secure than centralized databases.
According to https://btcmanager.com
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