Customer Data Sharing Platform: A Blockchain-Based Shopping Cart

Abstract

We propose a new free-ecommerce platform with blockchains that allows customers to connect to the seller directly, share personal data without losing control and ownership of it and apply it to the domain of shopping cart. Our new platform provides a solution to four important problems: private payment, ensuring privacy and user control, and incentives for sharing. It allows the trade to be open, transparent with immutable transactions that can be used for settling any disputes. The paper presents a case study of applying the framework for a shopping cart as one of the enterprise nodes of MultiChain which provides trading in ethers controlled by smart contracts and also collects users’ profile data and allows them to receive rewards for sharing their data with other business enterprises. It tracks who shared what, with whom, when, by what means and for what purposes in a verifiable fashion. The user data from the repository is converted into an open data format and shared via stream in the blockchain so that other nodes can efficiently process and use the data. The smart contract verifies and executes the agreed terms of use of the data and transfers digital tokens as a reward to the customer. The smart contract imposes double deposit collateral to ensure that all participants act honestly.