Cookie Intermediaries: Does Competition Lead to More Privacy? Evidence from the Dark Web

Description

The seminar focuses on firms that voluntarily share their customer information with third parties and the corresponding consequences. Specifically, the seminar discusses a paper in which the authors collect first-party cookies of 4,783 firms that are identified as a digital online platform and examine how they share customer information through these first-party cookies. Based on this sample, the authors analyse how the market structure of an industry sector affects the level of personal information leakage on the darkweb. The results show that firms in less concentrated markets share more customer information with third-party entities and experience more customer privacy information leakage than the firms in more highly concentrated markets. Further, the authors demonstrate that the data sharing activities with data brokers with more highly concentrated market share result in less customer personal information leakage. Thye result appears to suggest that the market structure and the level of competition are two factors that should be considered for policy decision-making in the field of privacy policy.

Period	3 Aug 2022
Event type	Seminar
Location	Clayton, Australia, VictoriaShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International