Privacy & Market Concentration: Intended & Unintended Consequences of the GDPR

This Cyber Alliance talk, featuring Questrom Assistant Prof. Garrett Johnson, will center on his paper showing how the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) reduced data sharing online, but had the unintended consequence of increasing market concentration among technology vendors that provide support services to websites. Websites that would face greater penalties under the GDPR dropped more vendors, and were more likely to drop smaller vendors. Increased concentration predominantly arose among vendors that use personal data such as cookies, and from the increased relative shares of Facebook and Google-owned vendors, but not from website consent requests. This suggests that increases in concentration are driven by website vendor choices rather than changes in user behavior.<br><br>There will be time for casual conversation before and after the presentation. Please email Mayank Varia at varia@bu.edu to request Zoom invite details.

When 3:30 pm to 5:00 pm on Wednesday, September 9, 2020
Location Online