Distributed Privacy Preserving Platform for Ridesharing Services

The sharing economy fundamentally changed business and social interactions. Interestingly, while in essence this form of collabora-tive economy allows people to directly interact with each other, it is also at the source of the advent of eminently centralized platforms and marketplaces , such as Uber and Airbnb. One may be concerned with the risk of giving the control of a market to a handful of actors that may unilaterally fix their own rules and threaten privacy. In this paper, we propose a decentralized ridesharing architecture which gives the opportunity to shift from centralized platforms to decentralized ones. Digital communications in our proposition are specifically designed to preserve data privacy and avoid any form of centralization. We integrate a blockchain in our proposition to guarantee the essential roles of a marketplace, but in a decentralized way. Our numerical evaluation quantifies the advantages and limits of decentralization and our Android implementation shows the feasibility of our proposition.