Daten sind der zentrale Rohstoff der digitalen Wirtschaft. Dementsprechend werden sie von zahlreichen Unternehmen begehrt. Die Preisgabe von persönlichen Informationen ist der Tauschwert für die Nutzung zahlreicher Onlinedienste. Diesen zahlen viele Internetnutzer bereitwillig. Besonders oft...

THE RIGHT OF PUBLICITY: PRIVACY REIMAGINED FOR A PUBLIC WORLD (Harvard University Press 2018), 256 pages, considers the opportunities and risks that today’s right of publicity laws pose. The right of publicity has become a negative force ― suppressing speech, blocking otherwise lawful uses...

This paper examines data property with an eye toward offering definitions that distinguish this type of property interest from that available for conventional intellectual property. The paper also will identify the legal rights vested in data creators as well as data protection rights for...

Online advertising is what funds free online content. Since its birth in the 1990’s, it has evolved into a multi-billion-dollar industry. At the core of this industry lies the ability to identify and track users through various technical means, such as web cookies. Online tracking for...

Google's new “Interest Based Advertising” (IBA) program represents the company's first foray into what is generally called “Online Behavioral Advertising”: In order to deliver more relevant advertising, Google will begin tailoring ads delivered through AdSense on the Google Content...

How much do consumers’ privacy valuations change under the influence of choice architecture? How does this influence affect the efficiency of data collection, by changing not only the quantity of data collected but also its representativeness? To answer these questions, we run a large-scale...

Differential Privacy offers the online advertising industry new means to increase consumer privacy by obfuscating consumer data. While achieving the same privacy, these means decrease targeting accuracy differently, subsequently reducing advertisers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for targeted...

Regulators implement Digital Service Tax (DST) – a tax applying to services of online advertisers and publishers – to generate tax revenue from the online advertising industry. Implementing DST on targeted ads increases their price and potentially decreases their number, thus mitigating the...

Advances in data collection and algorithms help advertisers to better target individual consumers by predicting each consumer's preferences. We first show that when consumers have uncertainties about their preferences, an ad targeted to a consumer carries an implicit message: the algorithm...