DATA PROTECTIONHow We Think About Protecting Data
A new study shows public views on data privacy vary according to how the data are used, who benefits, and other conditions.
How should personal data be protected? What are the best uses of it? In our networked world, questions about data privacy are ubiquitous and matter for companies, policymakers, and the public.
A new study by MIT researchers adds depth to the subject by suggesting that people’s views about privacy are not firmly fixed and can shift significantly, based on different circumstances and different uses of data.
“There is no absolute value in privacy,” says Fabio Duarte, principal research scientist in MIT’s Senseable City Lab and co-author of a new paper outlining the results. “Depending on the application, people might feel use of their data is more or less invasive.”
The study is based on an experiment the researchers conducted in multiple countries using a newly developed game that elicits public valuations of data privacy relating to different topics and domains of life.
“We show that values attributed to data are combinatorial, situational, transactional, and contextual,” the researchers write.
The open-access paper, “Data Slots: tradeoffs between privacy concerns and benefits of data-driven solutions,” is published today in Nature: Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. The authors are Martina Mazzarello, a postdoc in the Senseable City Lab; Duarte; Simone Mora, a research scientist at Senseable City Lab; Cate Heine PhD ’24 of University College London; and Carlo Ratti, director of the Senseable City Lab.
The study is based around a card game with poker-type chips the researchers created to study the issue, called Data Slots. In it, players hold hands of cards with 12 types of data — such as a personal profile, health data, vehicle location information, and more — that relate to three types of domains where data are collected: home life, work, and public spaces. After exchanging cards, the players generate ideas for data uses, then assess and invest in some of those concepts. The game has been played in-person in 18 different countries, with people from another 74 countries playing it online; over 2,000 individual player-rounds were included in the study.
The point behind the game is to examine the valuations that members of the public themselves generate about data privacy. Some research on the subject involves surveys with pre-set options that respondents choose from. But in Data Slots, the players themselves generate valuations for a wide range of data-use scenarios, allowing the researchers to estimate the relative weight people place on privacy in different situations.
The idea is “to let people themselves come up with their
