Alessandro Acquisti

Alessandro Acquisti is a Professor of Information Technology at MIT Sloan. His research has spearheaded the application of economics and behavioral economics to the study of privacy and personal data, and the investigation of privacy and disclosure behavior in social media.

 He is an inaugural Andrew Carnegie Fellow and the director of the PeeX (Privacy Economics Experiments) Lab. He has served on the Board of Regents of the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Academies’ Committee on Public Response to Alerts and Warnings Using Social Media. At Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), he was Chair of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) and founding Faculty Director of the CMU Digital Transformation and Innovation Center, sponsored by PwC. Security education tools he developed while at CMU were commercialized through Wombat Security Technologies, a startup later acquired by Proofpoint.

He has been the recipient of the PET Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies, the IBM Best Academic Privacy Faculty Award, the IEEE Cybersecurity Award for Innovation, the Heinz College School of Information's Teaching Excellence Award, and multiple best paper awards. He has held editorial roles at several journals and conference committees, including senior editor at Information Systems Research and associate editor at Management Science.

Acquisti has testified before U.S. Senate and House committees on privacy policy and consumer behavior, and has been frequently invited to consult on privacy policy issues by government bodies including the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Council of Economic Advisers, the Federal Trade Commission, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, and the European Commission. His TED talks on privacy and human behavior have been viewed online over 1.5 million times. In 2019, an interactive musical opera inspired by his research on social media, face recognition, and sensitive inferences from public data premiered at HERE Arts Center in New York’s West Village.

Acquisti holds a PhD from UC Berkeley and Master’s degrees from UC Berkeley, the London School of Economics, and Trinity College Dublin. He has held visiting positions at the Universities of Rome, Paris, and Freiburg (Visiting Professor); Harvard University (Visiting Scholar); University of Chicago (Visiting Fellow); Microsoft Research (visiting researcher); and Google (visiting scientist).