And you are here why?

/via http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2018/05/31/first-contact/ Jokes apart, the ethics around anonymity, confidentiality, informed consent, and so on are pretty well known in the field. That said,   there are barely any formal guidelines , let alone consequences (with the possible exception of black-balling). GDPR provides these consequences, and, hopefully, a spur to the creation of guidelines! ( This article also appears on my blog )

“ What happens after May 25th, 2018 to data on blockchains? ” The context being around Article 17, and the "right to be forgotten" . The answer, of course is some combination of “ It’s tricky ”, “ It depends ”, and “ It’s complicated ”. For the nonce, I’m going to ignore Personally Identifiable Information (PII) that’s actually placed on public blockchains. If you did that, or are doing that, well, good luck — you’re going to need it. On the private/permissioned blockchain side, there are a couple of options out there ( Note: By “private/permissioned”, I mean that the blockchains are deployed in an internal/controlled environment ) 1. Store PII elsewhere : This is the most obvious route, where you store PII in a separate database / storage / whatever, and you effectively do a JOIN on this data whenever you do blockchain stuff. The upside is that when you get an Article 17 request, you can nuke the data in this separate store and you’re done. The downside is, well ...