Empowering Citizens by a Blockchain-Based Robinson List
This work addresses privacy and trust issues for citizens relying on spam call protection services, though it appears incremental as it adapts existing blockchain methods to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of centralized Robinson lists for spam call protection by proposing a decentralized design using blockchain technology, specifically implementing a proof-of-concept with Algorand and evaluating its scalability and latency performance.
A Robinson list protects phone subscribers against commercial spam calls. Its least basic functionality is to collect the denial of the subscribers to be contacted by market operators. Nowadays, Robinson lists run as centralised services, which implies that citizens should trust third parties for the management of their choices. In this paper, we show a design that allows us to realise a Robinson list as a decentralised service. Our work leverages the experience developed by Fondazione Ugo Bordoni as the manager of the Italian Robinson list. We present a general solution and a proof-of-concept (PoC) adopting the Algorand technology. We evaluate the performances of our PoC in terms of its scalability and of the latency perceived by the involved actors. We also discuss aspects related to identity management and privacy.