Is use of Blockchain at odds with Right to be forgotten ?

[nelsonic]

Does the idea of having a distributed database where records cannot be deleted without "breaking" the chain mean that people lose the "Right to be forgotten" ? See:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain_(database)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten
• https://blog.google/topics/google-europe/reflecting-right-be-forgotten

[jackie-scholl]

It depends on what you're using Blockchain for. If you're using it for handling money, zcash is a highly anonymous public blockchain. If you're using it to store user data, I'd be interested to know what the perceived benefit is over tried and true distributed databases that do allow for editing and deleting records.

[nelsonic]

@raptortech-js which distributed database do you have experience with? (my interest in Blockchain is for storing sequential records in a system which then allows people to export their data and use it elsewhere...)

[jackie-scholl]

@nelsonic personally, I've used DynamoDB and Amazon Cognito Sync. For storing purely sequential records I'd use Amazon S3 (which I also have experience with), which is more of an object store than a database, which makes it (in my mind) even better for this task. If you don't want to use AWS, I believe Azure and Google Cloud Platform both have similar offerings. If you don't want to use the cloud, I'd use MySQL with replication or possibly MongoDB. If there was a massive amount of data (50+ TB), I'd consider Hadoop. If it was important that it be very highly distributed and fault-tolerant, I'd consider OrbitDB, but be careful; it's still at a very early stage of development.

The major advantages of S3 in this case are that it allows you to drop in data in absolutely any format, that it's very easy to append data, the very attractive cost structure, and the security controls available.

[nelsonic]

I tend to agree with Japanese courts on their ruling that certain crimes should not be "forgotten", e.g: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/02/right-to-be-forgotten-online-suffers-setback-after-japan-court-ruling "supreme court said, however, that the public’s right to know outweighed the man’s right to privacy, given the serious nature of his crimes"