SocialBlock: An architecture for decentralized user-centric data management applications for communications in smart cities

Abstract

Smart city projects stand out for including a wide array of communication systems and heterogeneous technologies operated by multiple entities that collect data from citizens in very different ways. Basically, these projects involve three main actors that may have conflicting interests regarding the ownership and exploitation of the generated data: public administrations, service providers and citizens. Nevertheless, this is not a new problem. Actually, the most popular communication systems on the Internet, such as social networks, often have issues of this kind that can become highly visible in the press, especially when service providers, who commonly store data generated by their users via centralized models, have a security issue leading to a massive data leak, or when providers take advantage of their dominant position to exploit data improperly or sell it to third parties. This paper proposes an architecture to create user-centric data management applications for communications in smart cities where data is stored and managed in a decentralized way to reduce dependency on service providers and return control of the data to the different actors involved in the communications. In this paper, a proof of concept of the proposed architecture is implemented, using Ethereum and the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) as the main tools, to demonstrate its feasibility, show concrete protocols, and discuss the proposal on an empirical basis.