Smart Contract-Driven Mechanism Design to Mitigate Information Diffusion in Social Networks

This paper presents a new direction in privacy preserving techniques for social networks based on consensus-driven blockchain and mechanism design principles. Privacy problem is among the class of the most important and fundamental problems in social networks. The most commonly accepted privacy solution is to incorporate a perfect data privacy policy and central system, which inherently lacks transparency and trust. All existing privacy techniques deny undesired users access to the information directly, but, in reality, the information may be forwarded to them from other users who possess the information. Our user-controlled privacy mechanism aims to control such data dissemination using simple game theoretic concepts combined with blockchain technology. Our mechanism applies to DAG structured networks (directed acyclic graphs), and our reward policy incentivizes the receivers if they do not diffuse the message in the network. We establish blockchain powered smart contracts to enable the flow of incentives in the system, without the involvement of a trusted third party. The owner of the message has to pay for the rewards, but our mechanism makes sure that the payment is minimum. In fact, the owner will have more utility when he/she pays. Our mechanism satisfies the necessary constraints of mechanism design, namely individual rationality, incentive compatibility, and weakly budget balance while ensuring privacy.