Alessandro Acquisti

Faculty

Alessandro Acquisti

Get in Touch

Title

About

Academic Groups

Academic Area

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). 

Publications

"Encouraging Users to Change Breached Passwords Using the Protection Motivation Theory."

Zou, Yixin, Khue Le, Peter Mayer, Alessandro Acquisti, Adam J. Aviv, and Florian Schaub. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction Vol. 31, No. 5 (2024): Article 63.

"The Economics of Privacy at a Crossroads."

Acquisti, Alessandro. In The Economics of Privacy, edited by Avi Goldfarb and Catherine E. Tucker, 21-71. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2024.

"Trends in Privacy Dialog Design after the GDPR: The Impact of Industry and Government Actions."

Warberg, Logan, Vincent Lefrere, Cristobal Cheyre, and Alessandro Acquisti. In Proceedings of the 22nd Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society, Copenhagen, Denmark: November 2023.

"Is There a Reverse Privacy Paradox? An Exploratory Analysis of Gaps Between Privacy Perspectives and Privacy-Seeking Behaviors."

Colnago, Jessica, Lorrie Faith Cranor, and Alessandro Acquisti. In Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, Lausanne, Switzerland: July 2023.

"Learning to Live with Privacy-Preserving Analytics."

Acquisti, Alessandro and Ryan Steed. Communications of the ACM Vol. 66, No. 7 (2023): 24-27.

"Nudges (and Deceptive Patterns) for Privacy: Six Years Later."

Acquisti, Alessandro, Idris Adjerid, Laura Brandimarte et al. In The Routledge Handbook of Privacy and Social Media, edited by Philipp Masur and Sabine Trepte, 257-269. New York, NY: Routledge, 2023.

Load More