Privacy in the Digital Age: Who Benefits from the Data Economy?

Alessandro Acquisti is a Professor of Information Technology and Public Policy at the Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and an Andrew Carnegie Fellow (inaugural class). He is the director of the Peex (Privacy Economics Experiments) lab at CMU and the co-director of CMU CBDR (Center for Behavioral and Decision Research). His research interests lie at the overlap of information technology, society, and economics. They include, primarily, the economics and behavioral economics of privacy and information security, and privacy in online social networks. Prof. Acquisti interested in the economic impact of privacy protection and privacy intrusions, the relations between privacy and economic rationality, and the dichotomy between expressed privacy attitudes and actual revealed behavior. Abstract of Professor Acquisti’s keynote speech: In the recent policy debate over privacy, the protection of personal information is often set against the benefits society is expected to gain from large scale analytics applied to individuals‘ data. An implicit assumption appears to underlay such a dichotomy between privacy and ‚big data‘: economic research is assumed to predict that the increasing collection and analysis of personal data will be welfare-increasing for data holders and data subjects alike. I will work from within traditional economic frameworks to scrutinize this notion. In so doing, I will highlight how results from economic research on data sharing and data protection paint a much more nuanced picture, and how both traditional economic models and behavioral economic research do not necessarily predict that more data sharing, and less privacy protection, univocally lead to increases in individual or aggregate welfare. Dieser Vortrag wird in Englisch stattfinden. Wir bitten um Anmeldung über per eMail (events@mcir.digital). This event will be held in Englich.