Enforceable Data Sharing Agreements Using Smart Contracts
This addresses the challenge of managing and enforcing data sharing agreements for individuals and organizations in applications like smart cities and healthcare, offering a novel alternative to traditional legal processes.
The paper tackles the problem of costly and hard-to-enforce legal data sharing agreements by proposing a framework that uses smart contracts and blockchain technology to automatically enforce terms, with experimental evaluation showing it is efficient and low-cost.
As more and more data is collected for various reasons, the sharing of such data becomes paramount to increasing its value. Many applications ranging from smart cities to personalized health care require individuals and organizations to share data at an unprecedented scale. Data sharing is crucial in today's world, but due to privacy reasons, security concerns and regulation issues, the conditions under which the sharing occurs needs to be carefully specified. Currently, this process is done by lawyers and requires the costly signing of legal agreements. In many cases, these data sharing agreements are hard to track, manage or enforce. In this work, we propose a novel alternative for tracking, managing and especially enforcing such data sharing agreements using smart contracts and blockchain technology. We design a framework that generates smart contracts from parameters based on legal data sharing agreements. The terms in these agreements are automatically enforced by the system. Monetary punishment can be employed using secure voting by external auditors to hold the violators accountable. Our experimental evaluation shows that our proposed framework is efficient and low-cost.