What motivates you to share your personal information online? Alessandro Acquisti studies the behavioral economics of privacy (and information security) in social networks.
Why you should listen
Online, we humans are paradoxical: We cherish privacy, but freely disclose our personal information in certain contexts. Privacy economics offers a powerful lens to understand this paradox, and the field has been spearheaded by Alessandro Acquisti and his colleagues' analyses of how we decide what to share online and what we get in return.
His team's surprising studies on facial recognition software showed that it can connect an anonymous human face to an online name -- and then to a Facebook account -- in about 3 seconds. Other work shows how easy it can be to find a US citizen's Social Security number using basic pattern matching on public data. Work like this earned him an invitation to testify before a US Senate committee on the impact technology has on civil liberties.
Read about his work in the New York Times »
What others say
Alessandro Acquisti, a behavioral economist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, is something of a pioneer in this emerging field of research. His experiments can take time. The last one, revealing how Facebook users had tightened their privacy settings, took seven years. They can also be imaginative: he has been known to dispatch graduate students to a suburban mall in the name of science. And they are often unsettling.
Alessandro Acquisti’s TED Talk
More news and ideas from Alessandro Acquisti
Tech
What are you revealing online? Much more than you think
July 1, 2014
What can be guessed about you from your online behavior? Two computer privacy experts -- economist Alessandro Acquisti and computer scientist Jennifer Golbeck -- on how little we know about how much others know.
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Seeing faces in the clouds, thanks to facial recognition software
July 29, 2013
In his TED Talk, Gavin Pretor-Pinney urges us to look to the skies and appreciate the incredible shapes — a heart, fish or a hand waving goodbye — that can be spotted (or imagined) in clouds. But what if you want to take your cloud-spotting game to the next level? The technology and art collective […]
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The battle between public and private: Alessandro Acquisti at TEDGlobal 2013
June 14, 2013
Stories of NSA spying have been rippling through the press in the past week or so, and Carnegie Mellon professor Alessandro Acquisti is here to tell us just how blurry the boundary between private and public has become in recent years. He begins by reminding us of the story of Adam and Eve, banished from the Garden of […]
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