【 Webinar Series - Innovation, Productivity, and Challenges in the Digital Era: Asia and Beyond 】
The Data Privacy Paradox and Digital Demand
Date: 7 Sep 2022 (Wed)
Time: 10am – 11:10am (Hong Kong Time, UTC+8)
A central issue in privacy governance is understanding how users balance their privacy preferences and data sharing to satisfy service demands. The authors combine survey and behavioral data of a sample of Alipay users to examine how data privacy preferences affect their data sharing with third-party mini-programs on the Alipay platform. The authors find that there is no relationship between the respondents’ self-stated privacy concerns and their number of data-sharing authorizations, confirming the puzzling data privacy paradox. Instead of attributing this paradox to the respondents’ unreliable survey responses, resignation from active protection of their data privacy, or behavioral factors in making their data-sharing choices, the authors show that this phenomenon can be explained by a curious finding that users with stronger privacy concerns tend to benefit more from using mini-programs. This positive relationship between privacy concerns and digital demands further suggests that consumers may develop data privacy concerns as a by-product of the process of using digital applications, not because such concerns are innate.
Speaker:
Long CHEN
President of Luohan Academy
Co-authors:
Yadong HUANG, Economist, Luohan Academy
Shumiao OUYANG, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Economics and Bendheim Center for Finance, Princeton University
Wei XIONG, Trumbull-Adams Professor of Finance, Professor of Economics, Department of Economics and Bendheim Center for Finance, Princeton University and Senior Fellow, ABFER
Discussant:
Pulak GHOSH
IIMB Chair of Excellence and Professor of Decision Sciences, Indian Institute of Management Bangalore
About the Webinar
Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Data, multilevel neural nets, the Internet of Things (IoT) and other digital technologies are transforming the world. They are strengthening innovation and productivity and innovation by rendering the future more predictable and reshaping individual, business, social, and government behavior. Asia leads the world in some of these endeavors, e.g., digital platforms. The OECD lists 40% of big new digital technologies as Asian. Almost half of global digital platform business-to-consumer revenues are Asian, versus only 22% from the U.S. and 12% from the Eurozone. Profound new policy challenges arising, in consequence, include: shifting skills demanded in labor markets and “digital divide” inequality, (ii) AI expanding financial inclusion or encoding inequality, expanding or obscuring accountability, increasing transparency or obscuring amoral decision-making, and (iii) digital privacy, unsanctionable on-line libel, misinformation, manipulation, and propaganda. The ABFER, therefore, plans a monthly e-seminar series spotlighting important new research, particularly the Asia-pacific related, into these issues and providing “state-of-the-art” overviews by prominent scholars. We hope policy makers and practitioners will find the e-seminars helpful and will alert researchers to issues needing attention.
Collaborating Organizers
ABFER, CUHK-Zhejiang University Joint Research Center for Digital Economy, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) Department of Economics, Center for Internet Development and Governance, Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management (Tsinghua SEM)