Im Rahmen des Brown Bag Seminars der Wirtschaftsinformatik hielt Herr Prof. Dr. Jens Großklags (Technische Universität München) am 12.06.2018 einen spannenden Vortrag zum derzeit hochaktuellen Thema “Cambridge Analytica and Facebook Apps: When Privacy Decision-Making Becomes Interdependent".

Abstract:
The vast majority of published research on privacy-decision making focuses on individual choices regarding personal privacy. However, with the accelerating usage of Social Network Sites (SNSs), we observe the increasing prevalence of scenarios impacting interdependent privacy, in which users are placed in a position of power over the sharing of personal information about other individuals, who in turn often have only very limited abilities to restrict such sharing. Within this broader context, our research focuses explicitly on interdependent privacy issues associated with third-party apps on SNSs. This scenario has been moved to the spotlight with the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal, where 270,000 Facebook users, who had adopted a survey app, triggered the eventual leakage of personal data from an estimated 87 Million other users to an untrustworthy organization. Key contributing factors for this unfettered bulk sharing of friends' data are obfuscated privacy settings, lack of feedback to the so-called friends, and - of course - the mere existence of this data transfer channel for friends' data to third parties. With Facebook having created this unwieldly and unintuitive design, our research then shows how users, who find themselves situated in this scenario, fail to recognize this threat of bulk data sharing of their friends' data. In particular, we show with an innovative methodology approach that users attribute a very small value to a single friend's personal information suggesting. We also show how sharing anonymity (i.e., whether disclosure of friends' information is anonymous), and context relevance (i.e., whether friends' information is necessary for apps' functionality) influence these sharing decisions. Another key contribution is the development of a rigorous behavioral model to comprehensively explain the valuation of friends' information. Finally, the talk will discuss additional privacy research efforts of our research group.

Herr Prof. Dr. Jens Großklags leitet den Lehrstuhl für Cyber ??Trust und ist Associate Professor am Institut für Informatik der Technischen Universität München. In seiner Forschungsagenda untersucht er aus theoretischer und praktischer Perspektive Privatsphäre, Sicherheit und vernetzte Interaktionen. Seine wissenschaftliche Arbeit ist sehr interdisziplinär und nutzt analytische, empirische und experimentelle Methoden.