Money Walks: A Human-Centric Study on the Economics of Personal Mobile Data
Abstract
In the context of a myriad of mobile apps which collect personally identifiable information (PII) and a prospective market place of personal data, we investigate a user-centric monetary valuation of mobile PII. During a 6-week long user study in a living lab deployment with 60 participants, we collected their daily valuations of 4 categories of mobile PII (communication, e.g. phonecalls made/received, applications, e.g. time spent on different apps, location and media, photos taken) at three levels of complexity (individual data points, aggregated statistics and processed, i.e. meaningful interpretations of the data). In order to obtain honest valuations, we employ a reverse second price auction mechanism. Our findings show that the most sensitive and valued category of personal information is location. We report statistically significant associations between actual mobile usage, personal dispositions, and bidding behavior. Finally, we outline key implications for the design of mobile services and future markets of personal data.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1407.0566,
title = {Money Walks: A Human-Centric Study on the Economics of Personal Mobile Data},
author = {Jacopo Staiano and Nuria Oliver and Bruno Lepri and Rodrigo de Oliveira and Michele Caraviello and Nicu Sebe},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1407.0566},
year = {2014}
}
Comments
15 pages, 2 figures. To appear in ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp 2014)