Has decentralised technology already outdated the GDPR?

Excellent piece by Tom Cox and Andrew Solomon from Kingsley Napley providing an overview of the effects of decentralised blockchain technology on the GDPR.

Immutability is “one of the key security features of a blockchain” which clearly clashes with GDPR’s right to be forgotten:

The GDPR was designed using the assumptions that custodians of data would continue to be centralised entities. However, technologies such as block chain are facilitating a move towards a decentralised model of data management. In spite of the dramatic changes taking place, regulators appear to be taking a ‘wait and see’ approach before considering how best to address the challenges of the future.

Although the new data protection regulation seems to be solving yesterday’s problems, a recent survey conducted by the Financial Times found that the tech sector is struggling to prepare.

Personal information has become the “backbone” of the industry, as it helps to generate “new product ideas and advertising revenues”, and so it has been suggested that the GDPR could be “one of the most expensive pieces of regulation in the sector’s history”.

Side note — check out Bank of England’s working paper on the economics of distributed ledge technology for security settlement.