How much is your privacy worth?

[Mind_your_head]

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Studies have repeatedly shown that the average person won’t pay anything to protect his or her privacy, and will do very little to protect it. Shoppers won’t pay extra to buy from more security conscious stores; AOL users won’t pay more for security tokens that protect their logins; and consumers readily surrender critical data such and home addresses in exchange for coupons and small discounts. That has led many observers to conclude that consumers don’t value privacy at all.

But to Acquisti, those observers are only looking at half the equation -- what people will pay to protect their personal information. What they would demand in exchange for explicit permission to distribute their personal information – something he calls “pay to allow” – is another matter entirely.

“If you ask people how much they would sell their personal information for -- sensitive information like how many sexual partners they’ve had -- they will say a very high price,” he said. “When we talk about the value of privacy to people, perhaps that’s the number we should talk about.”

Acquisti and fellow economist Jens Grossklags set out to quantify this buy-sell gap in a recent study. Privacy research is tricky because research subjects cannot be harmed, so the two could not simulate truly troubling privacy problems, such as exposure of Social Security numbers to Internet criminals.
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Much more: http://redtape.msnbc.com/2007/06/price_of_privac.html#posts