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<p>Consumer protection organizations increasingly face the challenge of providing legally valid evidence of violations in the digital sphere. Manipulative online content, incomplete or false information, and misleading advertising are often ephemeral, easily altered, and therefore difficult to preserve in a&#xa0;legally robust way. Conventional approaches such as screenshots are insufficient, as they can be manipulated through image editing or minimal changes to the source code. This paper presents a&#xa0;hybrid technical system that enables reliable and tamper-proof evidence preservation of such violations. The approach combines distributed ledger technology (DLT) to ensure data integrity with a&#xa0;verifying crowd-based safeguard operated by consumer protection staff. The solution allows recognized violations to be documented automatically by generating a&#xa0;hash of the web content, which is then stored together with metadata and a&#xa0;timestamp in a&#xa0;DLT system in an immutable manner. In addition, workstations of consumer protection employees confirm automatically the existence of the violation through parallel background captures, without requiring active user interaction. This procedure strengthens the evidential value, increases resilience against manipulation, and enables providers’ subsequent modifications or deletions to be legally demonstrated.</p>

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Digitale Beweissicherung im Verbraucherschutz: Eine DLT-basierte Lösung mit Crowd-Verifikation

  • 期刊论文

  • 出版模式：

    开放获取

  • 发表日期：

    2026年2月23日

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  • Meike Ullrich,
  • Nadja Kruse,
  • Gunther Schiefer,
  • Zina Al-Washash,
  • Steffen Kroschwald,
  • Thomas Schuster

摘要

Consumer protection organizations increasingly face the challenge of providing legally valid evidence of violations in the digital sphere. Manipulative online content, incomplete or false information, and misleading advertising are often ephemeral, easily altered, and therefore difficult to preserve in a legally robust way. Conventional approaches such as screenshots are insufficient, as they can be manipulated through image editing or minimal changes to the source code. This paper presents a hybrid technical system that enables reliable and tamper-proof evidence preservation of such violations. The approach combines distributed ledger technology (DLT) to ensure data integrity with a verifying crowd-based safeguard operated by consumer protection staff. The solution allows recognized violations to be documented automatically by generating a hash of the web content, which is then stored together with metadata and a timestamp in a DLT system in an immutable manner. In addition, workstations of consumer protection employees confirm automatically the existence of the violation through parallel background captures, without requiring active user interaction. This procedure strengthens the evidential value, increases resilience against manipulation, and enables providers’ subsequent modifications or deletions to be legally demonstrated.