Computing, Management Experts Evaluate Online Privacy Impact on Society
The risks of negative side effects from online privacy laws are being studied by researchers in NJIT's Martin Tuchman School of Management and Ying Wu College of Computing, in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon and Cornell universities, based on $1.2 million in National Science Foundation grants.
They want to examine assertions from news and media companies that privacy regulations are hurting ordinary users, because the regulations hamper publishers' financial viability, resulting in lower quality content or even the prospect of none at all.
If publisher concerns are valid — in claims that they're being shortchanged by advertising platforms on one side, while being pressed by users on the other side for free-content or low subscription prices, total privacy, and removal of intrusive ads — then the repercussions could be disastrous.
"In some sense, you could even claim that our democracy depends on the content that we get for free online [so] if you want lots of publishers and lots of different points of view, then you need to find a balance between privacy and profits," explained Professor Cristian Borcea, from Ying Wu College of Computing.
Given these risks, Borcea said, "Essentially we want to see the effect of these new privacy regulations both on the publishers, on the one hand — can they still make money, can they survive — and on the users on the other hand, does the privacy of the users improve using these regulations? Or is it all for nothing, that we have to click on a [privacy agreement] button when we go to these websites and nothing happens in the end?"
Borcea handles the publishing side and intends for his student to develop an open-source compliance-checking program. This project is in collaboration with four major publishing companies which are actively cooperating with the researchers. The publishers are not providing any funds, he noted.
Professor Yi Chen, who studies business data science in Martin Tuchman School of Management, focuses on end user privacy protection and their experiences. Professors Alessandro Acquisti and Cristobal Cheyre, at CMU and Cornell respectively, focus on the economic aspects of online privacy.
Grant money, $600,000 of which is for the NJIT team, will fund one graduate student for each of the four professors. The students will conduct data analytics studies.
"Really, how much privacy protection has been achieved? How useful these publishers' privacy implementations are, in reality, is not clear. How does privacy protection affect user experience and their engagement on the website? It can vary a lot among different implementations, among different publishers," observed Chen, the Martin Tuchman '62 Chair. "I think we might discover that parts of the regulations don't make a whole lot of sense," Borcea added.
Chen and Borcea suggested that a compromise between publisher profits and user privacy may exist in the application of machine learning software. They proposed a similar solution in collaboration with Forbes, an online publisher, on balancing online display advertising with user experience by developing machine learning and data science techniques.
One of their studies is to determine on-the-fly how a website reacts to ad-blockers based on current data and historical trends. They wrote about this approach in a 2022 article, Personalized Dynamic Counter Ad-Blocking Using Deep Learning, for the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.
