The Program on the Economics of Privacy at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School has been looking at empirical evidence around people’s privacy interests. Among their recent presentations was a paper in progress called “Demand for Privacy from Data Brokers” by Avinash Collis of the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. It piqued my interest, so I went looking and didn’t find the paper online. So that will be it for this blog post.

Kidding! What I did find was a recent paper assessing people’s “disutility” from seeing ads on Facebook. Disutility is economics talk for “don’t like.” Just how much do people HATE ads? Lots, right?

In a paper entitled “The Consumer Welfare Effects of Online Ads: Evidence from a 9-Year Experiment” (summarized here), Collis and coauthors surveyed two types of Facebook users: One control group had the same experience as all of us, seeing every ad Facebook wanted to throw at them. Group two was a special bunch: Since 2013, they have never seen advertisements on the site. (What a world.) How much did their enjoyment of Facebook differ?

“The study found no significant differences in users’ valuations between the two groups.” This, according to the researchers, suggests that “either the harmful effects of ads are relatively small or that certain benefits offset the harms.”

The study authors included researchers from Meta, parent company of Facebook, which accounts for the wonderful access to data and, of course, the possibility of bias.

The study’s results jibe with my own public opinion research on privacy values, conducted a few years ago. In it, we asked a sample of 3,000 users open-ended questions about privacy concerns, then classed their responses into eight categories of concerns, including excess commercialism.

That study, “What Do People Mean by ‘Privacy,’ and How Do They Prioritize Among Privacy Values? Preliminary Results,” found that financial security—basically, protection against identity fraud—was people’s topmost privacy concern. Other top interests include personal security, reputation, and autonomy. Lesser interests included general control of personal information, fairness, peace and quiet, and finally resistance to commercial uses of personal information.

The study invited consumers to rank these privacy concerns in order of their priority. In each of three ranking methodologies, poor hapless anti-commercialism was last.

That was a surprise to me. I would have guessed people prioritize differently. The policy conversation in Washington, DC, and state capitals focuses on commercial privacy issues, and I assumed that would be a reasonably strong interest of many people, though it is not one of mine. It just may be that policy elites have a very different set of privacy priorities than the public.

When legislators and regulators pursue anti-commercial policies, they might be going after something that doesn’t serve consumers all that well. I don’t think ads probably do much—I’m really blasé about advertising. But if consumers don’t dislike ads, I’d grant that their existence might inform consumers some about product offerings, heightening competition among sellers to serve consumers in the best way possible. It is nice to have all these subservient businesses around to serve our every need.

So I’m interested in learning Collis’s methodology and results as to people’s privacy preferences vis-à-vis data brokers, discussed at the above-mentioned conclave. I would hope that people have at least some concerns. There is good reason to worry about how they access data about us and what their clients use it for.

I’ve said before,

The techniques by which data brokers acquire information are particularly worthy of consideration—and of introspection on the part of industry. Many systems, including smartphone apps, collect information and place it into the brokered data “stream.” To the extent the data is wrongfully collected through fraud, misrepresentation, unfair advantage, breach of contract, and so on, data brokers should not acquire, use, or sell it. The obligation is on them to know the full provenance of the data they have so they do not profit from others’ misdeeds.

But that was in a post suggesting that data brokerage may provide significant value to the growing information economy. I look forward to finding out how consumers perceive data brokerage, which I look at as an industry that, cleaned up, is ready to take its place in the information economy.