Acquisti Receives NSF Grant for Privacy Study

Alessandro Acquisti, Assistant Professor of Information Systems and Public Policy, is the recipient of a three year National Science Foundation (NSF) research grant for Evaluating and Enhancing Privacy and Information Sharing in Online Social Networks.  Acquisti, with doctoral student Ralph Gross, will study the dynamics of information revelation in online social networks (OSN), evaluate the risks and develop ways of mitigating these risks without compromising the value of the online community.  Acquisti and Gross co-authored one of the earliest published papers (October, 2005) to address these issues.

Their new research will examine risks of identification and re-identification based on social network data; how OSN users choose to modify and remove information because of privacy concerns; perceived and actually foreseeable consequences of the long life span of online information; and tools to enhance privacy without disrupting communication.

Acquisti is a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), a member of the CMU Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory, a member of CMU Privacy Technology Center, and a partner at Carnegie Mellon CyLab. His research interests lie at the overlap of information technology, society, and economics. They include the economics of privacy and information security, the economics of computers and AI, agents economics, computational economics, ecommerce, cryptography, anonymity, and electronic voting.

Acquisti is the recipient of national and international awards, including the 2005 PET Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies and the 2005 IBM Best Academic Privacy Faculty Award. He has been invited to give plenary and keynote speeches at international events such as ETRICS and the Annual CACR Privacy and Security Workshop. He is or has been a member of the program committees of various international conferences and workshops, including ACM EC, PET, WEIS, Financial Cryptography, and WPES.