Please note: This talk will not be livestreamed or videotaped.

Food and discussion begin at 12:30 pm. No RSVP required for current Princeton faculty, staff, and students. Open to members of the public by invitation only. Please contact Jean Butcher at if you are interested in attending a particular lunch.

Many online markets are dominated by firms offering services for “free”, in exchange for the tracking of personal data. There are niche services that offer more privacy in exchange for less performance or convenience. But they are not as popular. What is puzzling is that a considerable portion of users say they are concerned about their online privacy in surveys, pointing to a market gap. In this talk findings are presented from on-going interviews with entrepreneurs and developers building privacy-enhanced services. The interviews uncover some unique economic and engineering challenges. This will be followed with an open discussion on solutions.

Bio:

Hadi Asghari is a Visiting Research Scholar at CITP and an assistant professor at the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. His current research focuses on privacy economics — notably the question of whether markets can produce privacy-enhancing services at scale. Hadi is a senior member of the economics of cybersecurity group at TU Delft, an interdisciplinary team that employs security data to understand the incentives of Internet actors and the effect of policies. He has co-authored reports for the OECD, the Dutch Government and the European Commission, and presented at various academic and industry forums. Hadi’s other interests include innovation, psychology, social movements and programming. In 2015, he was the organizing chair for the annual Workshop on Economics of Information Security (WEIS), hosted in Delft. In 2010-2012, he was on the board of TU Delft’s PhD council, as well as the chair of the Iranian Student Association. Prior to moving to the Netherlands, he worked as a software engineer and entrepreneur in Tehran, Iran.