Do Data Breaches Disclosure Laws Reduce Identity Theft?
By S. Romanosky, Rahul Telang, Alessandro Acquisti. Workshop on the Economics of Information Security, 2010
297 citations recorded by the source corpus.
In the United States, identity theft resulted in corporate and consumer losses of $56 billion dollars in 2005, with up to 35 percent of known identity thefts caused by corporate data breaches. Many states have responded by adopting “data breach disclosure laws” that require firms to notify consumers if their personal information has been lost or stolen. While the laws are expected to reduce identity theft, their effect has yet to be empirically measured. We use panel data from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to estimate the impact of data breach disclosure laws on identity theft from 2002 to 2009. We find that adoption of data breach disclosure laws reduce identity theft caused by data breaches by 6.1 percent, on average.
Subfields: Information Systems, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bf48a602c1f3b80d4bb935e35d2bc5f5afc74bb5
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In Information Systems
In Sociology and Political Science
- Curtis R. Taylor
- Liad Wagman
- Alessandro Acquisti
- George Loewenstein
- Lorrie Faith Cranor
- Laura Brandimarte
- Spyros Kokolakis
- Yong Jin Park
Citations in the corpus
- The Economics of Privacy (2016, methodology): “Using publicly available data, compiled byDataLossDB,9 Romanosky et al. (2011) report that about 75 percent of recorded breaches between 2002 and 2007 were caused by hackers or external sources, and that almost 78 percent involved theft of social security numbers, a piece of personal information…”
- The Economics of Personal Data and the Economics of Privacy (2010, methodology): “…consumers from knowing what happens to their data, have not been particularly effective in countering identity theft: using reported identity theft data from the FTC for the 2002-2008 period, Romanosky et al. (2008) have found that the adoption of disclosure laws reduced identity theft by about 6%.”