Money Walks: A Human-Centric Study on the Economics of Personal Mobile Data

In the context of a myriad of mobile apps which collect personally identifiable information (PII) and a prospective market place of personal data, we investigate a user-centric monetary valuation of mobile PII. During a 6-week long user study in a living lab deployment with 60 participants, we collected their daily valuations of 4 categories of mobile PII (communication, e.g. phonecalls made/received, applications, e.g. time spent on different apps, location and media, photos taken) at three levels of complexity (individual data points, aggregated statistics and processed, i.e. meaningful interpretations of the data). In order to obtain honest valuations, we employ a reverse second price auction mechanism. Our findings show that the most sensitive and valued category of personal information is location. We report statistically significant associations between actual mobile usage, personal dispositions, and bidding behavior. Finally, we outline key implications for the design of mobile services and future markets of personal data.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figures. To appear in ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp 2014

The Psychology of Privacy in the Digital Age

Privacy is a psychological topic suffering from historical neglect – a neglect that is increasingly consequential in an era of social media connectedness, mass surveillance and the permanence of our electronic footprint. Despite fundamental changes in the privacy landscape, social and personality psychology journals remains largely unrepresented in debates on the future of privacy. By contrast, in disciplines like computer science and media and communication studies, engaging directly with socio- technical developments, interest in privacy has grown considerably. In our review of this interdisciplinary literature we suggest four domains of interest to psychologists. These are: sensitivity to individual differences in privacy disposition; a claim that privacy is fundamentally based in social interactions; a claim that privacy is inherently contextual; and a suggestion that privacy is as much about psychological groups as it is about individuals. Moreover, we propose a framework to enable progression to more integrative models of the psychology of privacy in the digital age, and in particular suggest that a group and social relations based approach to privacy is needed