What Is Privacy Worth?

By Alessandro Acquisti, Leslie K. John, George Loewenstein. The Journal of Legal Studies, 2013

569 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Understanding the value that individuals assign to the protection of their personal data is of great importance for business, law, and public policy. We use a field experiment informed by behavioral economics and decision research to investigate individual privacy valuations and find evidence of endowment and order effects. Individuals assigned markedly different values to the privacy of their data depending on (1) whether they were asked to consider how much money they would accept to disclose otherwise private information or how much they would pay to protect otherwise public information and (2) the order in which they considered different offers for their data. The gap between such values is large compared with that observed in comparable studies of consumer goods. The results highlight the sensitivity of privacy valuations to contextual, nonnormative factors.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Marketing, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a449b6f8e0fc4e288141b048a6cbcd84b3cb1482

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Citations in the corpus

The Economics of Privacy (2016, background): “As a result, doubts are being expressed about the ability of self-regulatory “notice and consent” and transparency and control mechanisms to adequately protect consumers’ privacy (Acquisti et al., 2013; Solove, 2013).”
FlowSAN: Privacy-Enhancing Semi-Adversarial Networks to Confound Arbitrary Face-Based Gender Classifiers (2019, background): “One aspect of privacy involves granting users the right to determine which personal information to reveal and which to conceal [21], [22].”
Silent Listeners: The Evolution of Privacy and Disclosure on Facebook (2013, background): “Although university networks could be quite large (e.g., [2, 54]), this boundary generally separated students from family, employers, and municipal law enforcement.”
Warning: You are about to be Nudged (2015, unknown): “The same principle holds for other major decisions, including choices about purchasing insurance and taking steps to protect personal data.(3,4) Decisions about end-of-life medical care are similarly susceptible to the effects of defaults.”
Nudges for Privacy and Security (2017, unknown): “In behavioral experiments, Grossklags and Acquisti [2007] and Acquisti et al. [2013] showed that people are willing to accept more money in exchange for disclosing personal information than they are willing to pay to regain control over the same information.”