A Blockchain-Based Privacy-Preserving Model for Consent and Transparency in Human-Centered Internet of Things

The inclusion of human-related aspects in the Internet of Things paradigm leads to the development of models and solutions that address several challenges of our society. The adoption of these novel approaches is expanding rapidly on the road to what is now termed Society 5.0. However, leaving aside all the potential benefits that come from the interaction with these novel systems, an increasing number of people are concerned with the amount of data these systems can collect and share with data requesters. Several legal frameworks call for the adoption of practices regarding data protection and pushing for data control by the data owners. Unfortunately, most human-centric IoT-based systems lack mechanisms for managing resources and data in the user domain. Moreover, these tasks are typically delegated to a central entity; this necessarily implies a relationship of trust and can lead to problems related to transparency. To cope with these issues in this paper we present a privacy-preserving model that leverages the intrinsic features of the blockchain technology for consent management and transparency in Human-Centered Internet of Things environments. To show the feasibility of our approach, the proposed model is implemented, deployed in a test environment, and assessed using realistic scenarios.