Data Privacy - Publications - Faculty & Research

October 2018 (Revised July 2019)
Case

Sidewalk Labs: Privacy in a City Built from the Internet Up

By: Leslie K. John, Mitchell Weiss and Julia Kelley

Email mking@hbs.edu for a courtesy copy.

By the time Dan Doctoroff, CEO of Sidewalk Labs, began hosting a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session in January 2018, he had only nine months remaining to convince the people... View Details

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2013
Chapter

Privacy Breach Analysis in Social Networks

By: Frank Nagle

Over the past 5–10 years, online social networks have rapidly expanded, and as of March 2012 the largest online social network, Facebook, had over 901 million active members. The wealth of information users post in their social network profiles, as well as the... View Details

Keywords: Crime and Corruption; Social and Collaborative Networks; Social Media; Cybersecurity; Analytics and Data Science

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18 May 2007
Working Paper Summaries

An Empirical Approach to Understanding Privacy Valuation

Keywords: by Luc Wathieu & Allan Friedman

13 Feb 2024
Cold Call Podcast

Apple’s Dilemma: Balancing Privacy and Safety Responsibilities

Keywords: Re: Nien-he Hsieh & Henry W. McGee

13 Apr 2020
Working Paper Summaries

The Bulletproof Glass Effect: When Privacy Notices Backfire

Keywords: by Aaron R. Brough, David A. Norton, and Leslie John

Article

How to Use Heuristics for Differential Privacy

By: Seth Neel, Aaron Leon Roth and Zhiwei Steven Wu

We develop theory for using heuristics to solve computationally hard problems in differential privacy. Heuristic approaches have enjoyed tremendous success in machine learning, for which performance can be empirically evaluated. However, privacy guarantees cannot be... View Details

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19 May 2020
Research & Ideas

Why Privacy Protection Notices Turn Off Shoppers

says John. “When people weren’t presented with a privacy notice, their purchase interest was about twice that of those who had been shown the privacy notice.” In another experiment involving a car GPS... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Retail

02 Mar 2016
What Do You Think?

Is Apple’s Real Privacy Challenge Technology Innovation Itself?

application for commercial credit and other data points (is) right there on the first page of the Apple user contract--there for all to see. It would seem that this privacy gate is down for the FBI alone.”... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett; Technology

October 2018
Case

Fundraising at St. Camillus Hospital

By: Srikant M. Datar and Caitlin N. Bowler

St. Camillus is a fictional non-profit hospital in rural Maine facing a serious budget deficit. As Director of Marketing, Victoria Stern is building a team to modernize the hospital fundraising efforts. An interview with a promising candidate, who is also a digital... View Details

Keywords: Data Analysis; Data Privacy; Data Governance; Non-profit; Health Care; Fundraising; Data Security; Analytics and Data Science; Safety; Governance; Ethics; Health Care and Treatment; Cybersecurity

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2011
Chapter

Between Global and Local: The Invention of Data Privacy in the United States and France

By: J. Gunnar Trumbull

Keywords: Social Issues; Knowledge Management; Information Management; Rights; United States; France

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19 May 2014
Research & Ideas

Why Companies Should Compete for Your Privacy

and are not always credible. When Facebook acquired Moves, for example, Moves promised customers that it would not "commingle data with Facebook." Ten days later, however, its user agreement was updated to provide Facebook access to its... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Consumer Products

2023
Article

MoPe: Model Perturbation-based Privacy Attacks on Language Models

By: Marvin Li, Jason Wang, Jeffrey Wang and Seth Neel

Recent work has shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) can unintentionally leak sensitive information present in their training data. In this paper, we present Model Perturbations (MoPe), a new method to identify with high confidence if a given text is in the training... View Details

Keywords: Large Language Model; AI and Machine Learning; Cybersecurity

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Article

Uninformed Consent

By: Leslie K. John

Companies want access to more and more of your personal data—from where you are to what’s in your DNA. Can they unlock its value while respecting consumers’ privacy? View Details

Keywords: Personal Data; Privacy; Customers; Analytics and Data Science; Ethics; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms

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26 May 2022
HBS Case

Apple vs. Feds: Is iPhone Privacy a Basic Human Right?

championing privacy as controversy was swirling around an extensive US government surveillance program that had been disclosed by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. Snowden had leaked information indicating that... View Details

Keywords: by Avery Forman

January 2016
Case

Acxiom

By: John Deighton

Acxiom built the market for personal data, yet sales have been flat for a decade during which marketing's appetite for data has exploded. Will the acquisition of a digital data onboarder LiveRamp give marketers what they want from a data broker? View Details

Keywords: Big Data; Direct Marketing; Personal Data; Privacy; Digital Marketing; Retargeting; Rights; Analytics and Data Science; Ethics; Marketing; United States

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September 2015
Article

Design and Implementation of a Privacy Preserving Electronic Health Record Linkage Tool in Chicago

By: Abel Kho, John Cashy, Kathryn Jackson, Adam Pah, Satyender Goel, Jorn Boehnke, John Eric Humphries, Scott Duke Kominers and et al.

Objective
To design and implement a tool that creates a secure, privacy preserving linkage of electronic health record (EHR) data across multiple sites in a large metropolitan area in the United States (Chicago, IL), for use in clinical... View Details

Keywords: Information; Customers; Safety; Rights; Ethics; Entrepreneurship; Health Care and Treatment; Health Industry; Chicago

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November 2023
Article

Federated Electronic Health Records for the European Health Data Space

By: René Raab, Arne Küderle, Anastasiya Zakreuskaya, Ariel Dora Stern, Jochen Klucken, Georgios Kaissis, Daniel Rueckert, Susanne Boll, Roland Eils, Harald Wagener and Bjoern Eskofier

The European Commission's draft for the European Health Data Space (EHDS) aims to empower citizens to access their personal health data and share it with physicians and other health-care providers. It further defines procedures for the secondary use of electronic... View Details

Keywords: Analytics and Data Science; Cybersecurity; Information Management; Knowledge Sharing; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Health Industry

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March 2024 (Revised May 2024)
Case

Amperity: First-Party Data at a Crossroads

By: Elie Ofek, Hema Yoganarasimhan and Alexis Lefort

In the summer of 2023, Amperity management was facing a critical decision on its future direction. Given the dramatic changes occurring within the digital advertising ecosystem, as concerns over consumer privacy placed limits on the ability to engage in third-party... View Details

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Technology Adoption; Business Strategy; Digital Marketing; Price; Product; Business or Company Management; Advertising Industry

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October 2019 (Revised January 2020)
Case

Fixing Facebook: Fake News, Privacy, and Platform Governance

By: David Yoffie and Daniel Fisher

Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook based on the idea that connecting people was a fundamentally good thing—and a way to turn a handsome profit. But from the beginning, Facebook received criticism both for how it handled user privacy and how it curated user-generated... View Details