Thanks for the pointer to Nate Zelnick's column "Private Data as a Hard Good" in KDnuggets (http://www.kdnuggets.com/news/99/n22/i7.html) I thought you might be interested in the following: Markets and privacy; Kenneth C.Laudon; Commun. ACM 39, 9 (Sep. 1996), Pages 92 - 104 http://www.acm.org/pubs/citations/journals/cacm/1996-39-9/p92-laudon/ Given the legal protections Zelnick's proposal would require, it isn't too long a step to Laudon's proposal: Allowing individuals to not only control distribution of their personal data, but also to put a price on that data (and profit form it's sale/use). There were two papers at the Thirteenth Annual IFIP WG 11.3 Working Conference on Database Security, July 26-28, 1999, Seattle, WA that could be relevant: Chris Clifton, "Protecting Against Data Mining through Samples", Tom Johnsten and Vijay Raghavan, "Impact of Decision-Region Based Classification Algorithms on Database Security", These approach it from the other end (how can we make sure a sample is too small for the results to be valid) -- but with something like Laudon's proposal in place, I can see some interesting work tieing the cost of obtaining the data, the expected validity of the results, and the cost of invalid results. -Chris Clifton
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