Major blockchain group says Europe should exempt Bitcoin from new data privacy rule
Since people can store personal data in blockchains, the technology could fall under the purview of the upcoming European change to privacy law. But blockchain technology may be fundamentally incompatible with Europe’s new privacy rules, Washington, DC think tank Coin Center said today in a new post.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will take effect on May 25th this year, more than two years after it was first signed into law. Under the new rule, if an EU citizen requests that their personal data be erased from a company’s records, the company will have to obey.
But with blockchain, a complete erasure of any stored personal data might not be possible, experts told The Verge. “Modifying data on a blockchain is very hard,” Oxford Law lecturer Michèle Finck told The Verge, “If you were to delete or modify data from the blockchain to comply with the GDPR’s rights to amendment or the ‘right to be forgotten,’ you wouldn’t just change that piece of data, but the hash of the block containing the data and of all subsequent blocks.”
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