Blockchains and the GDPR pursue similar objectives where they seek to grant users greater control over their personal data. While the latter pursues this goal by imposing duties of care to centralised controllers and collectors of data, blockchains go a step beyond by trying to eliminate these...

Economics offer different but complementary approaches to understanding privacy and security. For this inaugural contribution to the new In Our Orbit department, I was asked to explain briefly their methodological differences and similarities, and why they matter in our thinking about security...

Various identity management solutions are emerging in different jurisdictions, with the goal of creating a unified and privacy-preserving identity management system bridging the offline with the online. Within this trend, the concept of self-sovereign identity has re-emerged. It is a concept...

We analyze personal data protection laws in the United States through the lenses of the economic theories of ex ante safety regulation, ex post liability and information disclosure. Specifically, we consider and contrast how legal and economic theories interpret privacy costs and the remedies to...

While the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has received significant attention in economic research, concerns that it would adversely affect websites' ability to provide quality content to their visitors have not been thoroughly investigated. We construct a longitudinal data-set...

Privacy and security tools can help users protect themselves online. Unfortunately, people are often unaware of such tools, and have potentially harmful misconceptions about the protections provided by the tools they know about. Effectively encouraging the adoption of privacy tools requires...

The principle of data protection by design, as it is enshrined in article 25 of the GDPR, is difficult to apply in blockchains. This article will assess how the reliance on asymmetric encryption and other privacy enhancing technological architectures -necessary in a blockchain-based system-...

By allowing individuals to be permanently connected to the Internet, mobile devices ease the way information can be accessed and shared online, but also raise novel privacy challenges for end users. Recent behavioral research on “soft” or “asymmetric” paternalism has begun exploring ways...