Privacy and integrity and blockchain in the food industry

Please watch this short clip of president Ilves of Estonia, in which he explains the motive for moving all government data of Estonia to the blockchain:

Privacy is no longer an issue, data integrity is what we should worry about.

Who doesn’t use Google? And what do you pay for it? Nothing. However, nothing is free in this economy. How do you pay? With data. So, with your privacy. You give away your privacy to use ‘free’ services. Both my children studying at a university are aware of this: “Privacy is overrated, since the introduction of internet privacy no longer exists.”

President Ilves truly worries about integrity of data, especially the data integrity of his citizens. In 2007 Estonia was hit by major cyber attacks. Professional hackers, probably authorized by a foreign government, targeted early 2007 several Estonian institutes. Computer systems and websites of ministries, banks, the parliament, newspapers and broadcasters were disabled¹.

President Ilves decided in 2007 to increase the security level of all government data. In 2012 this was realized by storing data on the only safe medium available at this moment: the blockchain².

Blockchain, or better ‘Distributed Ledger Technology’, is a technology in which transactions (for example transferring a Bitcoin from A to B, or changing your marital status from ‘single’ to ‘married’) are posted to a ledger. This ledger is distributed between many computers, so the data is stored redundant and is therefore always available. At this moment Bitcoin ledger is stored on 10,000 nodes. The Ethereum ledger even on 15,000 nodes. Changing the ledger on all these nodes is practically impossible, resulting in a 100% secure data storage.

Transactions on a blockchain can only be appended. Updating or deleting data is impossible. This means that you can always look back at previous transactions, which in turn ensures immutability and traceability.

With blockchain technology we can store 100% reliable data. A huge step in the development of data storage and data security.

We are going to manage our own data. And decide who we give access to and who does not get access. We will manage our own identity in the near future: our health records, our identity documents, our personal details for social media, our work history for job interviews. And if we want to use the ‘right to be forgotten’ from the recently introduced GDPR, we will simply deny a company’s access to our data. In this way we also solve the GDPR compliance problem of entrepreneurs.

Blockchain will also bring major changes in supply chains. A clear example of this is the food industry. We want the products we consume to be safe and reliable. And preferably we want to be able to trace whether the food actually complies with what is on the packaging.

There is a huge amount of quality marks. Who knows all these labels? And who understands these labels? And, more importantly, who trusts these quality marks? Who knows for sure that they comply with the content of the product?

That is exactly the problem. We can not verify this. We do not know whether the contents of the packaging comply with the food label. We can only trust, or hope, that claims made by certifying institutions about our products are correct.

With blockchain technology a solution can be offered for this: we simply register all process steps of the supply chain in a blockchain. Can not be changed, indisputable. And safe and always available.

We could store data from the process steps in the beef industry.

As a consumer, we can then see exactly that free-range meat is free-range meat, whether organic meat is indeed organic.

Fraud can still take place in those processes where people are involved, but fraudulent incidents can be detected earlier by indisputable, public registration of transactions.

With a transparent blockchain, with integer data, we could have already noticed before 2013 that hundreds of thousands kilograms of horse arrived at slaughterhouses all over Europe and that the same hundreds of thousands kilograms of processed beef left the factories. Then the horse meat scandal⁴ had come to light much earlier.

After investing heavily in Know Your Customer, more attention will have to be paid to Know Your Product in the production industry. From KYC to KYP. The consumer wants to know what he consumes and where it comes from. Blockchain technology makes this possible.

But blockchain technology can be applied in more areas. Maybe also in your business?

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