3 April 2014: Ad- revenues fuel online entities like Google, Facebook who in turn setup datacenters and purchase hardware, buy bandwidth more personal information, by entities like from Telcos and invest in human capital. In Google, Facebook and even device return, end-users obtain services for free – manufacturers like Apple, leading to – Facebook, GMail, Search etc. However increased scrutiny from privacy there have been recent efforts to exploit watchdogs as well as mainstream media.
Such frequent and increased privacy intrusions have led to efforts to curtail the leak of personal information like cookie- blockers, privacy preserving proxies etc. at the risk of hindering the business models that many of these online services operate under; for instance ads in the case of search. Hence there is a tussle between online application providers wanting to exploit more personal information and end-users who want to protect that information.
Our proposal to address this tussle is an online marketplace, where personal information can be leased to third party providers like Google etc. for adequate compensation to the end-users.
The Telco acts as a middleman between users and the third party providers. We are studying this problem using a multi- disciplinary approach, using tools from economics, HCI and computer science.
