International Focus
BLOCKCHAIN AND THE RIGHT TO BE FORGOTTEN
Carlos Eduardo Pereira
Treasurer of the International Board of ELSA 2020/2021
In this article, I ponder about the future of data management and how we are going to balance technological systems with law regulations. However, this is an open and extensive topic, so I’m going to focus on one specific personal right, the right to erasure, related and adjusted with one technological step, the blockchain system. Regarding the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”), this was a significant advance in fixing a new legal framework for data protection and its related rights. This is a European regulation with the goal of protecting personal rights and fixing limits in the use of the data processing of those essential rights, accomplishing the status of an international human right in respect to access to information. This was implemented specifically in article 17A, the so-called ‘right to be forgotten was replaced by a more limited right to erasure in the version of the GDPR adopted by the European Parliament in March 2014. Article 17 mentioned the right to erasure establishes that: “the data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller the erasure of personal data concerning him or her without undue delay and the controller shall have the obligation to erase personal data without undue delay…”. The article scope fixes the chance of European citizens to request the deletion of the processed data when it is not necessary for relation to its purposes, or when the consent was withdrawn by the data subject. On the other hand, constitutes an obligation for the data receiver to erasure this data.
24 | SYNERGY Magazine
Meanwhile, together with this new European legal context to data protection, the automation systems are increasing their capacity of storage data in every device and IT system. More and more, technology will continue to have a decisive role to save and processing data. The blockchain is an example of a technological concept of recording information, operating mainly in the financial system as a fintech instrument. Consisting in operating a digital ledger, in which transactions are organised and added to this participant’s ledger. This system has an origin in the financial markets, specifically following the bitcoin structure, having a certain autonomy from the cryptocurrencies system, securing and processing blocks of data with the support of cryptography. The first element to take into consideration in this relation between law and technical enforceability is transparency. Blockchain technology is defined to understand its structure. Every blockchain user is assigned a public address that in no way identifies them. This information is completely open, data subjects can view these holdings and transactions at will. Also defining the roles of each participant, establishing an entity mentioned as the controller and processor, or if it will be implemented a joint controllership. Related to this, is the consent management related to Blockchain users, in which we are intended to understand if it accomplishes mainly informative requirements requested by the article 7º /2 in the GDPR “shall be presented in a manner which is clearly distinguishable
