Economic perspective to online privacy

CCSL promotes the presentation “Economic perspective to online privacy” by  Vijay Erramilli, a research at Telefonica Research.

Date: 10/05 (sexta-feira)
Time: às 10hs
Where: Sala B-05 IME-USP

Abstract: The defacto operating model for many online services is to offer the service for free, attract users, and collect and monetize the information of these users via advertisements. This model has led to increasing privacy concerns and hence attracted the attention
of privacy advocates, researchers and regulators. While a lot of work has been done to address privacy from a technical point of view, little work has been done from understanding the problem from an economic point of view.
In this talk, i'll try to present a case on why online privacy issues can be solved using an economically-driven solution. First, i'll present some recent work that uncovered another (economically driven) use of personal information online -- how your information can be used to set tailored prices for the same product while shopping online, also referred to as price discrimination. Then i'll spend some time on our work on uncovering what economic value do users assign to their information. I'll also talk about recent work on exploiting the cloud to make communication more efficient for cellular networks, by relying on abstractions provided by HTML5, via the new open source mobile OS: Firefox OS.

Bio: Vijay Erramilli is currently a researcher at Telefonica Research. Barcelona and has been there since Feb 2009. Prior to that, he was finishing up his PhD at Boston University. His recent research interests include online privacy, leveraging the cloud for mobiles, and network economics. More broadly, he is interested in measurements and algorithms. In his spare time Vijay likes playing squash, photography, underground music and is a foodie.