What Price Privacy, Paying For Apps edition
There’s a new study on what people would pay for privacy in apps. As reported by Techflash:
A study by two University of Colorado Boulder economists, Scott Savage and Donald Waldman, found the average user would pay varying amounts for different kinds of privacy: $4.05 to conceal contact lists, $2.28 to keep their browser history private, $2.12 to eliminate advertising on apps, $1.19 to conceal personal locations, $1.75 to conceal the phone’s ID number and $3.58 to conceal the contents of text messages.
Those numbers seem small, but they’re in the context of app pricing, which is generally a few bucks. If those numbers combine linearly, people being willing to pay up to $10 more for a private version is a very high valuation. (Of course, the numbers will combine in ways that are not strictly rational. Consumers satisfice.
A quick skim of the article leads me to think that they didn’t estimate app maker benefit from these privacy changes. How much does a consumer contact list go for? (And how does that compare to the fines for improperly revealing it?) How much does an app maker make per person whose eyeballs they sell to show ads?