Family Preferences Concerning Online Privacy, Data Mining, and Targeted Ads: Regulatory Implications

Abstract

is professor of operations and information management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His education includes an S.B. in physics from MIT, and an M.S. and a Ph.D. in operations research from Cornell University. His research for the past 30 years has involved the systematic study of the transformational effects of information on the strategy and practice of business. He was among the first scholars to study online global securities trading, business process outsourcing, channel conflict and e-commerce, and the effect of information on product proliferation and the transformation of consumer behavior in these new marketplaces. More recently, he has begun studying privacy and the challenges of applying current antitrust law to online business models. He is the founder and project director for the Wharton School's Sponsored Research Project on Information: Strategy and Economics within the Program for Global Strategy and Knowledge Intensive Organizations. He has also held appointments at the Harvard Business School, the Johnson School of Management at Cornell, the Engineering College at Cornell, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Peking University Law School, and the Desautels Centre at the Rotman School of the University of Toronto. He has published over 100 scholarly papers and regularly publishes online in Huffington Post, Business Insider, and Tech Crunch. JOSHUA S. WILSON is research coordinator for Eric Clemons in the Department of Operations and Information Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His research and teaching interests include strategic uses of information systems, information economics, online privacy, and the analysis of mandatory participation third-party payer markets such as search. He received his B.A. in philosophy, politics, and economics from the University of Pennsylvania.ABSTRACT: Young Internet users engage in risky or inappropriate behavior online that could either be embarrassing or harmful to their future. As importantly, young Internet users engage in online activities that reveal a great deal about the cost to serve them and their willingness to pay for goods and services, which could be used against them by well-informed sellers. Educational applications that collect users' information are becoming ubiquitous in the classroom, presenting the opportunity for students' data to be mined. We are not aware of prior studies that examine parental or students' attitudes and preferences toward data mining of educational application accounts, and how these attitudes differ across several countries. We used three survey instruments to measure parents' and students' attitudes toward data mining of educational applications. Parents in all countries studied prefer far less data mining of students' online activities than seems to be the current practice. Most importantly, aversion to data mining does not seem to be correlated with awareness of current practices of data mining of teens' activities. This study highlights regulatory ...

Privacy perception and information technology utilization of high school students

“…It is well-known that teenagers and younger children engage in risky activities online and these groups often do not take adequate care to protect themselves online (Clemons and Wilson, 2015; De Souzaa and Dick, 2009; Pew Research Center, 2013; Shear, 2013). Facebook and other social network sites pose severe risks to their users' privacy and users continually negotiate and manage the tension between perceived privacy risks and expected benefits (Debatin et al., 2009; Kaya and Bicen, 2016; Tüfekci, 2008).…”

“…Facebook and other social network sites pose severe risks to their users' privacy and users continually negotiate and manage the tension between perceived privacy risks and expected benefits (Debatin et al., 2009; Kaya and Bicen, 2016; Tüfekci, 2008). In addition, educational applications that collect users' information present the opportunity for students' data to be mined; that is, data-mining privileges that are now being granted to some providers of educational applications and services create new risks to preteen and teen privacy (Clemons and Wilson, 2015). High school students' attitudes toward data mining of educational applications, data privacy, and privacy while using mobile technologies, Internet, and SNSs have been examined with different focus in the literature of the different contexts and cultures.…”

Computing and Social Welfare: Minimizing the Societal Harm From Digital Transfor-mation While Preserving the Benefits of Innovation

“…Not surprisingly students engage in unsafe behavior online, and not surprisingly there is parental support for increased protection against data mining their children's online behavior. This was true in all 12 countries in which we conducted surveys [8,10,11].…”

“…We are conducting a large research program addressing the emerging discipline of social welfare computing [4,5,6,8,9,10,11,24]. We acknowledge the extent to which computing both improves aggregate wealth and aggregate social welfare but feel the need to explore the burdens it imposes on some segments of society, perhaps unfairly.…”

“…Platform envelopment has become much more prevalent with the increased importance of software platforms [6]. The best known examples involve Microsoft [3,8] and Google [3,29].…”