Issue No.02 - March/April (2008 vol.6)
Alessandro Acquisti , Carnegie Mellon University
DOI Bookmark: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MSP.2008.35
In the economics literature, privacy is usually discussed in the context of consumers' preferences and price discrimination: merchants are interested in finding out a consumer's preferences, because from the latter they can infer the consumer's maximum willingness to pay for a good. However, economists also acknowledge that consumer privacy is not just about hiding the price you may pay for a good: during any economic transaction a consumer may rationally want to share with a merchant certain types of personal data while keeping others private. Identity management systems can support such selective information revelation strategies, allowing for economic transactions in which some level of information sharing is accompanied by some level of information hiding. In this paper we discuss what forms of privacy of personal data are compatible with merchants' interests in knowing more about their consumers and their preferences, and examine several ways in which identity management systems can protect certain types of information privacy while simultaneously enabling personalization and price discrimination.
Privacy, identity management systems, economics, price discrimination
Alessandro Acquisti, "Identity Management, Privacy, and Price Discrimination", IEEE Security & Privacy, vol.6, no. 2, pp. 46-50, March/April 2008, doi:10.1109/MSP.2008.35