Last week at our Research Seminar Series, Gillian Ponte, a visiting PhD student from the University of Groningen, presented his research on marketing analytics and consumer perceptions of privacy.

While firms collect personal data for acquiring marketing insights, consumers are increasingly concerned about the privacy of their data and refuse to disclose information, share false information, or provide socially desirable answers. This lack of trust in the data collection strategies leads to a response bias, which has scientific and economic consequences.

In this project named “Consumer Perceptions of Differential Privacy’s Privacy Risk” Gillian Ponte aims to reduce the consumers’ response bias within the framework of the differential privacy. While differential privacy is regarded as the best option for protecting the disclosed information by consumers, there is little known about the consumers’ perception of differential privacy’s privacy risk. Drawing on his previous work, Gillian Ponte investigates the consumers’ objective privacy risk via perceived privacy risk. In order to understand the effect of differential privacy’s impact on the consumers’ perceived risk, he conducted a field experiment with a Dutch loyalty program where the consumers’ are offered discounts in exchange for their private data. In the field experiments, the consumers' perceived privacy and response biases are studied with the privacy protection option. The study reveals that consumers’ perceived privacy concerns are reduced with stronger mathematical privacy protection. Furthermore, the response bias is decreased with differential privacy protection.

We thank him for the presentation and all participants for the vivid discussion of a timely topic.