What’s likely to change in privacy policies and privacy regulation?  How will your firm prepare? MSI member companies have had their business practices roiled by regulatory changes in privacy policies and changes in platform privacy policies by Apple and Google. Many firms were caught flat footed.

Now, new research is showing flaws and unintended consequences of these privacy policies such as propensity to favor the big players with better first party data. Data can enhance competition. Earlier industry concerns about these possibilities were just talk.  Now those concerns are borne out by rigorous academic research. We should anticipate that regulation and platform policies will adjust as we more fully understand the externalities of privacy policies — how actions of one market participant indirectly affect some uninvolved third party.

This workshop will provide a framework to help MSI member companies answer questions like:

• Why do consumers tend to allow some forms of data collection even if they are fully aware of the potential for the data to cause harm?
• Under what circumstances will firms collect too much personal data, both for their customers and for themselves?
• What is the role of policy in regulating data flows?
• How can we be ready for the changes in privacy policies by others?

Avi Goldfarb is the author of just published Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence. He is the Rotman Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare and a professor of marketing at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Avi is also Chief Data Scientist at the Creative Destruction Lab and the CDL Rapid Screening Consortium, a faculty affiliate at the Vector Institute and the Schwartz-Reisman Institute for Technology and Society, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Avi’s research focuses on the opportunities and challenges of the digital economy.