Data Cooperatives for Neighborhood Watch

The increasing proliferation of user data is moving the world from the era of 'big data' to a new era of shared data, and some are considering data as a factor of production that is paving the way for a new business economy. In this paper, we propose a solution that uses blockchain technology as a platform for online neighborhood watch using a form of data cooperative among individuals or organizations in the sharing of data through a peer-to-peer mechanism. We prove the concept by implementing a distributed phishing data sharing system that will maintain a community ledger of reported phishing activities with a consensus-based approval of the phishing transaction and a novel reputation scoring system thereby adding reliability to the system and effectively tackling the phishing problem. The data cooperative provides a way for timely multi-party sharing of phishing data among anti-phishing organizations and users of the internet eliminating the current approach of each organization maintaining its database. Our results show that blockchain is effective in complementing the existing methods of phishing detection and serves as a platform for sharing phishing data with respect to scalability, cost, and memory consumption. Also, our results further show that transaction times on the Ropsten test net follow a Gamma distribution. Our approach can be extrapolated to other data sharing systems like medical data, spam calls, discussion forums, etc.