Overview
Professor of Information Technology and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University (Heinz College). Research bridges privacy economics, behavioral decision-making, and information security. Known for empirical demonstrations that individually innocuous public data sources can be combined to infer sensitive private information at scale.
Key Contributions / Features
- Lead author of Acquisti and Gross (2009), which demonstrated that SSNs can be predicted from birth date and state of birth alone using the SSA Death Master File, directly prompting SSA to randomize SSN assignment in 2011.
- Co-author of Gross and Acquisti (2005) on information disclosure and privacy in online social networks — one of the first studies documenting how social network profiles expose sensitive personal information.
- Research agenda on the "economics of privacy": how people under-value their own privacy, the market structure of personal data, and the policy implications of information asymmetries in data markets.
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