Large majorities of consumers believe that the term "privacy policy" conveys a baseline level of information practices that protect their privacy. In short, "privacy," like "free" before it, has taken on normative meaning in the marketplace. When consumers see the term "privacy policy," they...

"The Federal Trade Commission, a US agency created in 1914 to police the problem of 'bigness', has evolved into the most important regulator of information privacy - and thus innovation policy - in the world. Its policies profoundly affect business practices and serve to regulate most of the...

This nationally representative telephone (wire-line and cell phone) survey explores Americans' opinions about behavioral targeting by marketers, a controversial issue currently before government policymakers. Behavioral targeting involves two types of activities: following users' actions and...

Consumers have a dim understanding of how companies share personal information. To "shine a light" on information sharing practices, the authors employed a unique California law to survey the information sharing practices of 112 businesses. This follow-on study to a similar, smaller survey in...

Google has come to symbolize the tensions between the benefits of innovative, information-dependent new services and the desire of individuals to control the contexts in which personal information is used. This essay reviews hundreds of newspaper articles where Google speaks about privacy in an...

The ubiquity of mobile phones has long promised to spell the success of mobile payment platforms — a world in which the phone is a universal currency and no one needs plastic. While such predictions have proven mostly fruitless in the past, there is increasing evidence that the next few years...

This is a collection of the reports on the Annenberg national surveys that explored Americans' knowledge and opinions about the new digital-marketing world that was becoming part of their lives. So far we've released seven reports on the subject, in 1999, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2009, 2010, and 2012....

At the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), all privacy and security matters are assigned to a consumer protection economist from the agency's Bureau of Economics (BE). The BE is an important yet often ignored element of the FTC. Advocates and others operating before the Commission have been...