Alessandro Acquisti
More info
- Affiliation
- Carnegie Mellon University
- Known for
- Economics and behavioural science of privacy
Italian economist who keeps demonstrating how little it takes for the anonymous to be named.
Acquisti studies why people say they care about privacy and then trade it away for almost nothing — the so-called privacy paradox. His answer is that the choices aren't stupid but shaped by how they're framed: defaults, ordering and a sense of control matter more than the actual risk.
Two studies made him known outside academia. In 2009 he and Ralph Gross showed that US Social Security numbers could be predicted with uncomfortable accuracy from date and place of birth. In 2011 his group matched photos from a dating site against Facebook profiles using off-the-shelf face recognition and put names to strangers. The work sits next to Latanya Sweeney's and is part of why differential privacy gets taken seriously.