Collective privacy recovery: Data-sharing coordination via decentralized artificial intelligence

Abstract

Abstract Collective privacy loss becomes a colossal problem, an emergency for personal freedoms and democracy. But, are we prepared to handle personal data as scarce resource and collectively share data under the doctrine: as little as possible, as much as necessary? We hypothesize a significant privacy recovery if a population of individuals, the data collective, coordinates to share minimum data for running online services with the required quality. Here, we show how to automate and scale-up complex collective arrangements for privacy recovery using decentralized artificial intelligence. For this, we compare for the first time attitudinal, intrinsic, rewarded, and coordinated data sharing in a rigorous living-lab experiment of high realism involving >27,000 real data disclosures. Using causal inference and cluster analysis, we differentiate criteria predicting privacy and five key data-sharing behaviors. Strikingly, data-sharing coordination proves to be a win–win for all: remarkable privacy recovery for people with evident costs reduction for service providers.