Multi-Stakeholder Consent Management in Genetic Testing: A Blockchain-Based Approach

Notwithstanding the personal and societal benefits of genetic testing, the sharing of genetic such information is always also accompanied by privacy risks. Owing to the kinship property of genetic information, the decision of sharing one’s genetic information with a third party has the potential to not only infringe the privacy of those who actively decide to share their data, but also of their relatives. Within this research-in-progress we propose a Blockchain-based system for the management of consents in situations where data is associated with multiple stakeholders (e.g., several blood relatives). To this end, we present a structuring of the problem under considerations and describe first meta-requirements as well as design principles for such multi-stakeholder consent management systems.