In the United States, identity theft resulted in corporate and consumer losses of $56 billion dollars in 2005, with up to 35 percent of known identity thefts caused by corporate data breaches. Many states have responded by adopting “data breach disclosure laws” that require firms to notify...

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...

While the effectiveness of nudges in influencing user behavior has been documented within the literature, most prior work in the privacy field has focused on ‘one-size-fits-all’ interventions. Recent behavioral research has identified the potential of tailoring nudges to users by leveraging...

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...

Self-reported behavioral data is frequently relied upon to understand the population of social network users. These data often consist of self-reported posting, commenting or general engagement frequency within the social network over the last few days or a month. Using a sample of 397 Google+...

Anecdotal evidence and scholarly research have shown that a significant portion of Internet users experience regrets over their online disclosures. To help individuals avoid regrettable online disclosures, we employed lessons from behavioral decision research and research on soft paternalism to...