Challenges and Opportunities of Distributed Ledger Technologies for Consent Management – A Review

Blockchain technology offers advantages, such as full openness, high reliability, traceability, and trust, making it ideal for global data sharing and building decentralized data platforms. However, the transparency and immutability of blockchain pose challenges to user privacy and data protection regulatory requirements, particularly in sectors like healthcare, where regulatory compliance is crucial. With careful consideration of the aforementioned challenges, this paper examines how blockchain can be leveraged for consent management by securing privacy-preserving commitments, thereby creating an auditable, immutable trail without compromising privacy. We first determined the research questions critical to engaging blockchain in consent management. Then we comprehensively review the current research on this topic and outline the challenges and possible shortcomings of using blockchain in information systems with strong privacy requirements for the data involved, finally, we analyze the approaches, limitations, risks, opportunities, and challenges of applying distributed ledger technologies for consent management.