Empowering citizens by a blockchain-Based Robinson list*

Robinson lists are adopted in many countries to protect phone subscribers against commercial spam calls. In its essence, they collect the denial of the subscribers to be contacted by marketing operators. Nowadays, all Robinson lists run as centralised services. Namely, citizens have to rely on trusted third parties for the management of their own choices. The Blockchain allows us to envision the development of a decentralised Robinson list in which citizens are finally empowered to autonomously manage their choices. In this paper, we present a proof-of-concept (PoC) of a decentralised Robinson list developed with the Algorand technology. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to implement a Robinson list on a blockchain technology. The PoC has been designed to support the requirements provided by Fondazione Ugo Bordoni, the manager of the Italian Robinson list. The evaluation of the PoC shows that our decentralised solution provides satisfactory performance, in terms of scalability, latency and costs, when compared to the current centralised service.