Do Tech Companies Really Need All That User Data?

The online economy — from search to email to social media — is built in large part on the fact that consumers are willing to give away their data in exchange for products that are free and easy to use. But a new working paper, released this week by Lesley Chiou of Occidental College and Catherine Tucker of MIT, suggests that the trade-off may not always be necessary. By studying the effects of privacy regulations in the EU, they attempt to measure whether the anonymization and de-identification of search data hurts the quality of search results. “Our results suggest that the costs of privacy may be lower than currently perceived,” the authors write.