Gregory M. Dickinson, Assistant Professor of Law at St. Thomas University Benjamin L Crump College of Law, has published his paper “Privately Policing Dark Patterns” in the Georgia Law Review. The paper may be read here.
Please see below for a video of Professor Dickinson explaining his work.
The Program on Economics & Privacy (PEP) at George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School held a Research Roundtable on Competition and Consumer Protection Issues Surrounding Information Flows.
A conversation between PEP Director James C. Cooper and Professor Alessandro Acquisti.
Alessandro Acquisti is the Trustees Professor of Information Technology and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College. His research combines economics, behavioral research, and data mining to investigate the role of privacy in a digital society. His studies have promoted the revival of the economics of privacy, advanced the application of behavioral economics to the understanding of consumer privacy valuations and decision-making, and spearheaded the investigation of privacy and disclosures in social media.
Abraham L. Wickelgren, the Fred and Emily Wulff Chair at the University of Texas Law School, has published his paper “The Effect of Consumer Inferences on Privacy Regulation When Information is Costly”. The paper may be read here.
Please see below for a video of Professor Wickelgren explaining his work.
Dr. Brenden Kuerbis, a Research Scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Public Policy, and his coauthor Dr. Milton Mueller, Professor and Program Director, Masters of Science in Cybersecurity Policy at the George Institute of Technology, have published the paper “Exploring the Role of Data Enclosure in the Digital Political Economy”. The paper can be read here.
Researchers Cristobal Cheyre, Benjamin T. Leyden, Sagar Baviskar, and Alessandro Acquisti have published a new paper titled “The Impact of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency Framework on the App Ecosystem.” The reading can be accessed here.
Aileen Nielsen, Ph.D. Student at ETH Zurich’s Center for Law & Economics, has published a new paper titled “Whose Data, Whose Value? Simple Exercises in Data and Modeling Evaluation and Implications for Tech Law and Policy.” The piece can be accessed here.
2023 is turning out to be an eventful year for privacy policy. The FTC has proposed modifications to its Facebook order that would keep Facebook from monetizing data from minors, and has flexed its enforcement powers through a broad interpretation of its Health Breach Notification Rule—one that it now wants to codify. At the same time, a federal judge dismissed the Commission’s case against Kochava for failure to sufficiently allege consumer harm, and the Supreme Court dealt it another blow to the FTC in Axon, which is likely to spur additional challenges to the constitutionality of the FTC and its (recently amended) administrative adjudication procedures. All the while, Congress continues to consider various privacy bills, with the American Data Privacy and Protection Act (ADPPA) appearing to gain the most traction. And states are jumping in to fill the void left by congressional inaction with their own privacy laws, as well as laws directed at social media platforms.
New research from James Cooper, Garrett Johnson, Tesary Lin, and Liang Zhong uses YouTube’s settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over allegations that it violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) as a natural experiment to evaluate the impact of eliminating personalization— including tailored ads and platform features like personalized search and content recommendations—on made-for-kids content. The study of 5,066 top American YouTube channels from 2018-2020 finds that child-directed content creators produce 13% less content and pivot towards producing non-child-directed content. On the demand side, views of child-directed channels fall by 22%. Consistent with the platform’s degraded capacity to match viewers to content, the study finds that content creation and content views become more concentrated among top child-directed YouTube channels. Read the full study here.
University of Texas at Austin Fred And Emily Marshall Wulff Centennial Chair in Law Abraham Wickelgren has a new publication titled “Optimal Privacy Regulation When Consumers Make Inferences From Regulatory Policy“. The piece can be accessed here.
