Privacy and innovation

Abstract

Information and communication technologies now enable firms to collect detailed and potentially intrusive data about their customers both easily and cheaply. Privacy concerns are thus no longer limited to government surveillance and public figures' private lives. The empirical literature shows that privacy regulation may affect the extent and direction of data-based innovation. We also show that the impacts of privacy regulation can be extremely heterogeneous. We therefore argue that digitization has made privacy policy a part of innovation policy. © 2012 by The National Bureau of Economic Research. All rights reserved.