To Share or Not to Share: an Economic Approach on Privacy Trading in the Age of Pervasive Computing

Abstract—In the last decade, revolutionary services and appli-cations based on users ’ locations, social interactions or prefer-ences have been gaining momentum. However, these novel ser-vices require users to share private information about themselves, thus leading to a tension between short-term benefits and long-term privacy provision. In my thesis research, I plan to investi-gate, by using an economic approach, how people trade their own privacy. I will also develop technical and economic mechanisms to reveal some information without losing all the users ’ privacy. This write-up describes my motivation, summarizes the three selected background papers and explains how I plan to progress towards my thesis objectives. Index Terms—privacy, economics, incentives, mobile networks I