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...

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...

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...

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...

Participation in social networking sites has dramatically increased in recent years. Services such as Friendster, Tribe, or the Facebook allow millions of individuals to create online profiles and share personal information with vast networks of friends - and, often, unknown numbers of...