Analysis of the blockchain users' perception on GDPR compliance

Since the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect in May 2018, concerns about the legal compliance of public blockchain systems have emerged. Such concerns are mainly centered around the tension between unique characteristics of those systems and some new data subject rights introduced in the GDPR, e.g., the data immutability and the "right to erasure" (a.k.a. "the right to be forgotten"). Similarly, the public and permissionless characteristics of the public blockchain systems challenges the GDPR compliance. Anyone may, without authorization, participate in the network anonymously as a node which makes it impossible to identify data controllers and processor and assign responsibilities for personal information processing. The aim of this work is to understand GDPR awareness of blockchains users analyzing social media data. For this purpose, we selected 50 public blockchain systems according to their capital market size, and we used two different online communication channels: forum posts and tweets from Twitter. Public tweets posted by identified users who are mentioning official Twitter accounts of blockchain systems or using related hashtags were collected and main concerns about the principles outlined in the GDPR were investigated. We enriched the dataset with posts shared on official forums of the systems. We automatized tweet analyses by making use of machine learning based classification and natural language processing (NLP) based topic modelling approaches to get GDPR associated conversations from a corpus with among more than eleven millions of tweets. Our results show that the users of public blockchain systems did not talked about the GDPR-related issues so much on both Twitter and forum websites. We realized that the users of public blockchain systems does not know much more information about the GDPR. A few number users have concerns about the GDPR-related issues, and they talked about the GDPR on public blockchain system. As a result, we can easily say that there is a lack of communication between the users of public blockchain systems and the GDPR.