Today, Professor Lars Hornuf will present his research project „The Social Dilemma of Big Data“ at the Workshop on "AI & FINANCE“ at Goethe-University Frankfurt.

By implementing an online experiment among 1,696 US citizens together with his co-author Kirsten Hillebrand, he finds that individuals would donate their data even when at risk of getting leaked. The willingness to provide personal data depends on the risk level of a data leak but not on a realistic impact of the data on social welfare. Individuals are less willing to donate their data to the private industry than to academia or the government. Finally, individuals are not sensitive to whether the data are processed by a human-supervised or a self-learning smart assistant. The necessity to mobilize individual user data has recently become omnipresent in the context of governmental policies to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. Various countries around the world have developed and implemented tracking apps that use personal infection and location data to help control the spread of the virus and to protect public health. The research project helps to solve the social dilemma associated with donating personal data.