"The social dilemma of big data": New publication in Information and Organization

New Publication in Information and Organization

Professor Dr. Lars Hornuf has published a new article in Information and Organization under the title "The social dilemma of big data: Donating personal data to promote social welfare" The article emerged in collaboration with his former Ph.D. student Prof. Dr. Kirsten Hillebrand (Bern University of Applied Sciences), Prof. Dr. Benjamin Müller and Daniel Vrankar (both Universität Bremen).

When using digital devices and services, individuals provide their personal data to organizations in exchange for gains in various domains of life. Organizations use these data to run technologies such as smart assistants, augmented reality, and robotics. Most often, these organizations seek to make a profit. Individuals can, however, also provide personal data to public databases that enable nonprofit organizations to promote social welfare if sufficient data are contributed. Regulators have therefore called for efficient ways to help the public collectively benefit from its own data. By implementing an online experiment among 1696 US citizens, the four authors find that individuals would donate their data even when at risk of getting leaked. The willingness to provide personal data depends on the perceived risk level of a data leak but not on the realistic impact of the data on social welfare. Individuals are less willing to donate their data to the private industry than to academia or the government. Finally, individuals are not sensitive to whether the data are processed by a human-supervised or a self-learning smart assistant.

The full article can be accessed here.