Few are averse to sharing personal data

Abstract

A group of researchers from academia and corporate sector around the globe (led by us) recently answered the question—will the potential pitfalls of the human-centric data economy (for example, privacy risks) be potent enough for people in India to opt-out of doing personal data commerce in HCDEs?—in the negative by running large-scale pilot randomised controlled trials conducted between 2014 and 2019 on sections of the Indian population. Through detailed statistical analyses, the researchers found that privacy awareness programmes did not have a statistically significant impact to sway the general population towards rejecting the concept of transparent HCDEs. The results will appear in the INFORMS/ACM/IEEE Winter Simulation Conference 2021 to be held in Arizona, US, which is a premier global research forum for industrial statistics modelling and applications. Our notion of ‘transparency’ implies individuals, prior to personal data sale, should be informed/educated of the data being collected by online firms along with privacy risks accompanying such activities. This action is necessary in the Indian context where smartphone penetration among the population (urban and rural) is very high—on the contrary, digital literacy (forget privacy literacy) is virtually non-existent for over 90% of the population.