Blockchain-Based Data Transparency: Issues and Challenges

With the high-speed development of Internet of things, wearable devices and mobile communication technology, large-scale data continuously generate and converge to multiple data collectors, which influences people’s life in many ways. Meanwhile, it also causes more and more severe privacy leaks. Traditional privacy aware mechanisms such as differential privacy, encryption and anonymization are not enough to deal with the serious situation. What is more, the data convergence leads to data monopoly which hinders the realization of the big data value seriously. Besides, tampered data, single point failure in data quality management and so on may cause untrustworthy data-driven decision-making. How to use big data correctly has become an important issue. For those reasons, we propose the data transparency, aiming to provide solution for the correct use of big data. Blockchain originated from digital currency has the characteristics of decentralization, transparency and immutability, and it provides an accountable and secure solution for data transparency. In this paper, we first propose the definition and research dimension of the data transparency from the perspective of big data life cycle, and we also analyze and summary the methods to realize data transparency. Then, we summary the research progress of blockchain-based data transparency. Finally, we analyze the challenges that may arise in the process of blockchain-based data transparency.