I Did Not Accept That: Demonstrating Consent in Online Collection of Personal Data

Privacy in online collection of personal data is currently a much debated topic considering, amongst other reasons, the incidents with well known digital organisations, such as social networks and, in Europe, the recent EU/GDPR regulation. Among other required practices, explicit and simply worded consent from individuals must be obtained before collecting and using personal information. Further, individuals must also be given detailed information about what, how and what for data is collected. Consent is typically obtained at the collection point and, at a single point in time (ignoring updates), associated with Privacy Policies or End-User Agreements. At any moment, both the user and the organization should be able to produce evidence of this consent. This proof should not be disputable which leads us to strong cryptographic properties. The problem we discuss is how to robustly demonstrate such consent was given. We adapt fair-exchange protocols to this particular problem and, upon an exchange of personal data, we are able to produce a cryptographic receipt of acceptance that any party can use to prove consent and elicit non-repudiation. We discuss two broad strategies: a pure peerto-peer scheme and the use of a Trusted Third Party

A discrete firefly algorithm to solve a rich vehicle routing problem modelling a newspaper distribution system with recycling policy

A real-world newspaper distribution problem with recycling policy is tackled in this work. In order to meet all the complex restrictions contained in such a problem, it has been modeled as a rich vehicle routing problem, which can be more specifically considered as an asymmetric and clustered vehicle routing problem with simultaneous pickup and deliveries, variable costs and forbidden paths (AC-VRP-SPDVCFP). This is the first study of such a problem in the literature. For this reason, a benchmark composed by 15 instances has been also proposed. In the design of this benchmark, real geographical positions have been used, located in the province of Bizkaia, Spain. For the proper treatment of this AC-VRP-SPDVCFP, a discrete firefly algorithm (DFA) has been developed. This application is the first application of the firefly algorithm to any rich vehicle routing problem. To prove that the proposed DFA is a promising technique, its performance has been compared with two other well-known techniques: an evolutionary algorithm and an evolutionary simulated annealing. Our results have shown that the DFA has outperformed these two classic meta-heuristics