Vlog with Prof. Tobias Salz (MIT) on the Effect of Privacy Regulation (GDPR) on the Data Industry

In their paper external page The Effect of Privacy Regulation on the Data Industry: Empirical Evidence from GDPR external page Guy Aridor (Columbia), Professor external page Yeon-Koo Che (Columbia) and Professor external page Tobias Salz (MIT) study the effects of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) enacted by the European Union. They use data provided by an anonymous intermediary that operates in more than 40 countries and contracts with many of the largest online travel agencies and travel meta-search engine. Their analysis shows that the opt-in requirement of GDPR resulted in 12.5% drop in the intermediary-observed consumers, but that the remaining consumers are trackable for a longer period of time. These findings are consistent with privacy-conscious consumers substituting away from less efficient privacy protection (e.g, cookie deletion) to explicit opt out - a process that would make opt-in consumers more predictable. Consistent with this hypothesis, the average value of the remaining consumers to advertisers has increased, offsetting some of the losses from consumer opt-outs.

In the new episode of CLE's vlog and podcast series, Professor Tobias Salz discusses the study and its results with Professor Stefan Bechtold (ETH).