How GDPR may help drive blockchain usage for content
The application of blockchain to content authentication has been gaining traction, and it may get an extra push from the zeitgeist brought about by the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
GDPR is designed to protect consumers and change the way companies approach consumer data. Though GDPR doesn’t address data about content and its provenance, it’s ushering in an era of increased awareness about data and the desire for transparency. Given its potential, and given the widespread concern about “fake news,” one could easily see a scenario in which blockchain was employed to safeguard the legitimacy of information on the internet worldwide.
Taking a step back, let me explain what I mean by blockchain for content. It would involve creating a decentralized public ledger of every change, down to a single comma, that is made to published content — be it a website, an article, a blog post or countless other forms of material.
Each piece of content published as part of a blockchain receives a unique hash (or one-of-a-kind ID comprised of numbers and characters), time-stamped with authorship verified, that could be tied to related content. It creates a sort of master ledger of digital content that can’t be gamed or compromised.
This level of tracking, reporting and archiving is already starting to happen privately in heavily regulated industries like financial services and pharmaceuticals, and as new regulations like GDPR come into play, there is a greater interest in making information transparent in the public domain.
In financial services, pharmaceuticals and several other industries, governments routinely require an electronic trail of changes made to materials. Thus far, it hasn’t been required to be part of a public ledger, but regulators do need access to this sort of information.
They must be able to traverse through the history of the content to make sure that — at every point and for however long that content was published — it didn’t violate rules and regulations. To assist, content management systems are developing their own mechanisms, which can be searched. Companies utilizing them then can say, “We have this, it’s all recorded, and it’s honest.”
But these solutions to date have all been centralized — held in private clouds or closed networks. A more comprehensive solution would have this information be public, which is why we should expect to see real decentralized blockchains go mainstream in the near future. The underlying technology is there.
In addition to providing the basic history of content and several industry-specific applications, blockchains can be the key to protecting intellectual content on a broader scale as well. By comparing content and its origins to a public ledger, true original sources can be tracked. Plagiarism can be compared and tracked much more easily, too.
