A data driven analysis of public online communications of blockchain systems's developers and service providers

The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect in May 2018 with the aim of protecting privacy of data subjects in the EU and any personal data that are collected or processed in the EU. For this purpose, it defines principles and the lawful bases for processing personal information, and also specifies rights for individuals. Those rights e.g., the ``right to be forgotten'' raise several concerns about the legal compliance of public blockchain systems. Due to very nature of those systems, individuals cannot exercise their rights and request deletion or update of their data. The aim of this thesis is to understand how service providers and developers of public blockchain systems perceive the GDPR compliance problem and communicate it to their users. For this purpose, we analyzed public communications and the discussions of the 50 public blockchain systems with a market value of over $ 150 million in three online channels: Official GitHub repositories, tweets published by official accounts and official Forum and Blog of the systems. Our results show that the service providers and the developers of selected blockchain systems do not take an active role on Twitter. They also do not use their forums and blogs to communicate or inform their users on compliance issues where we could identify very few (56) posts that mention GDPR out of 17,821 posts we collected for the period we studied. Finally, only an extreme minority (4) of GitHub repositories are addressing compliance issues. It is possible to conclude that there is a lack of transparency and active communications of the public blockchain sector on the challenging GDPR compliance issue of public blockchain systems