The Economics of Privacy (remote presentation)

In the policy and scholarly 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 individual data. An implicit assumption underlays the contrast between privacy and 'big data': economic research is assumed to univocally predict that the increasing collection and analysis of personal data will be an economic win-win for data holders and data subjects alike - some sort of unalloyed public good. Using a recently published review of the economic literature on privacy, I will work from within traditional economic frameworks to investigate this notion. In so doing, I will highlight how results from economic research on data sharing and data protection actually paint a nuanced picture of the economic benefits and costs of privacy.