A Blockchain-based approach for matching desired and real privacy settings of social network users

Social networks store a considerable amount of personal data, which are also a source of information for business. To comply with users’ privacy rights, all social networks allow users to select the level of privacy they desire. However, what occurs if the privacy choices of a user are modified unilaterally by the social network? The privacy settings chosen by the user are stored by the social network, which acts as a privileged party, which could tamper with the user's choices at any time. This paper addresses this problem and proposes a decentralized approach to manage the privacy settings of a user. Any change in the privacy settings of a social network user is validated by a smart contract to ensure that it is compliant with users’ expectations. The proposed solution has been implemented as an Ethereum-based decentralized application to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.