Privacy and Personalization in a Dynamic Model

GitHub provides developers with a practical way to distribute source code and collaboratively work on common projects. To enhance account security and privacy, GitHub allows its users to manage access permissions, review audit logs, and enable two-factor authentication. However, despite the endless effort, the platform still faces various issues related to the privacy of its users. This paper presents an empirical study delving into the GitHub ecosystem. Our focus is on investigating the utilization of privacy settings on the platform and identifying various types of sensitive information disclosed by users. Leveraging a dataset comprising 6,132 developers, we report and analyze their activities by means of comments on pull requests. Our findings indicate an active engagement by users with the available privacy settings on GitHub. Notably, we observe the disclosure of different forms of private information within pull request comments. This observation has prompted our exploration into sensitivity detection using a large language model and BERT, to pave the way for a personalized privacy assistant. Our work provides insights into the utilization of existing privacy protection tools, such as privacy settings, along with their inherent limitations. Essentially, we aim to advance research in this field by providing both the motivation for creating such privacy protection tools and a proposed methodology for personalizing them.

The ever increasing number of surveillance camera networks being deployed all over the world has resulted in a high interest in the development of algorithms to automatically analyze the video footage, but has also opened new questions as how to efficiently manage the vast amount of information generated and, more important, how to protect the privacy of the individuals being recorded in their daily life. In this paper, we present a survey on video summarization techniques developed in order to efficiently access to the points of interest in the video footage. Thereby, we emphasize on the links that these techniques show with the task of privacy protection and draw lines of future research directions to incorporate indexing and summarization as tools for privacy protection by design.

Machine learning and data mining threaten personal privacy, and many tools exist to help users protect their privacy (e.g., available privacy settings on Facebook, anonymization and encryption of personal data, etc.). But such technologies also pose threats to "group privacy," which is a concept scholars know relatively little about. Moreover, there are few tools to address the problem of protecting group privacy. This paper discusses an emerging class of software applications and services that pose new risks to group privacy by revealing group-level information based on individual information, such as social media postings or fitness app usage. The paper describes the results of two experiments that empirically establish the concept of group privacy and shows that it affects user perceptions of and interactions with information technology. The findings serve as a call to developers to design tools for group privacy protection.

The effect of a license limitation and buyback program implemented for the Texas bay shrimp fishery on effort, rents, license price, and consumer and producer surplus is simulated. Results indicate the original program will not reduce effort and increase rents until year 16 of the program. To decrease the time necessary to reduce effort, additional funds to buy back licenses are needed. Results indicate that if an additional $500,000 per year were available at the beginning of the program to buy licenses, positive rents would have started in the third year of the program. Increased funds available to the program would have also resulted in the largest impact on consumer and producer surplus changes. Although the present value of changes is positive for producer and consumer surplus, producers clearly gain more than consumers.

Strong support for the biofuels program in the USA is expected to influence dedicated biomass crops production. Their production is expected to compete for resources with traditional crops and in turn influence commodity prices, economic surplus, and trade balance. Implications of dedicated biomass crop as bioenergy feedstock, alternative energy policies, and government initiatives on agricultural producers and consumers are evaluated using a national quantitative model, AGSIM. Economic impacts include effect on cropping patterns, crop prices, fertilizer prices, consumer and producer surplus, and trade balance. Economic analyses based on alternative assumptions related to marginal lands currently in conservation use returning to crop production as well as biomass crop yields are conducted. Results indicate that present biofuel policies are associated with large costs to consumers in terms of increased commodity prices and negative trade balance. Increase in net farm income is offset by decrease in consumer surplus. The results represent a robust set of economic impacts, which suggests policy makers to consider the unexpected economic consequences of bioenergy policy and warrants consideration of multiple alternative energy sources to achieve a sustainable energy goal.

History-based price discrimination and entry in markets with switching costs: A welfare analysis

Information, mis-information, and history-based price discrimination in a duopoly

In this article, we develop a model encompassing behavior‐based discriminatory pricing as a limit case of a more general framework where firms have incomplete information about consumers’ purchase histories. We show that information accuracy has a nonmonotonic impact on profits and the worst situation for firms is when information accuracy is intermediate. We also discuss welfare and consumer surplus implications of information accuracy. Although welfare monotonically decreases with the level of information accuracy, there is an inverse U‐shape relationship between consumers surplus and information accuracy.

Economic implications of a virus prevention program in deciduous tree fruits in the US

This paper calculates consumer's surplus and producer's surplus created by online auction. It includes 100 auctions completed via eBay. The consumer's surplus is calculated by the difference between the market price outside the auction and the hammer price in the auction. The producer's surplus is determined by the gap between the hammer price and the minimum bid. It discovers that the summation of consumer's and producer's surpluses which constructs the economic welfare exceeds the total value of hammer prices around 1.59 times. The value of the economic welfare is $74 billion in 2007 and $121 billion in 2013. The growth of economic welfare is around 8.62% per year. Additionally, producer's surplus surpasses consumer's surplus which means that online auction is the market for sellers rather than for buyers. The study also finds the determinants of both consumer's surplus and producer's surplus using Tobit model. The modeling reveals that the number of bidders significantly reduces the consumer's surplus but insignificantly raises the producer's surplus. The market price outside the auction raises the producer's surplus. The reduction of $1 of the minimum bid per piece reduces the consumer's surplus by $0.09 billions but increases the producer's surplus by $13.5 billions for the whole auctions in 2014. Therefore, a good strategy to boost the economic welfare created by online auction is to set the starting price low, sell valuable items and keep the number of bidders considerably limited.

Summary Sustainable Agriculture is a term that has grown out of global call for sustainable development. Unfortunately, the term has been very widely adopted to represent a variety of initiatives. If the term is to retain any meaning it must be refined and defined. In this paper sustainability was defined as: The maintenance of the net benefits agriculture provides to society for present and future generations. This definition is very much a humanist approach, which includes both consumer and producer surplus. The paper identifies the conflict that may occur between consumer surplus, producer surplus and total economic surplus. From a consumer surplus point of view food security, and discounting are major issues. The compensating variation of a famine may be infinite making food security a primary goal of many nations. The maximization of the net returns from agricultural production represents me producer surplus point view. A second, somewhat related concern is the maintenance of minimum level of income in the agricultural sector. Consumer surplus is threatened by food scarcity, and agricultural income is threatened by surpluses. Price is the best measure we have of scarcity. To discuss sufficiency in the absence of price is very misleading. Similarly, describing sustainability in terms of expected output and prices is also misleading. It is unplanned scarcity and abundance that threatens food security and economic viability respectively. It is therefore, the ability of the agricultural system to respond and rule out extreme price that is central to the issue of sustainability. Given the inelastic nature of the demand the ability for sustainable agriculture may largely be a function of the elasticity of supply. The ability of fixed factors such as land to enter and exit a sector may also augment sustainability. A thirdsource, of economic flexibility is alternative technologies that can be applied at very low or high prices. This flexibility has to be valued not at expected prices but rather for the option values at extreme prices. Government has a role in sustainability. Governments should pursue policies which enhance the elasticity of supply. Policies that stabilize income through prices have the opposite effect. These programs should at a minimum be decoupled. Secondly, governments should spend research dollars on technologies that enhance the elasticity of supply. Finally, land set aside programs, add great deal to the elasticity of supply.

The use of partial equilibrium models is common, and, typically, efficiency is characterized by maximizing consumer plus producer surplus (or, sometimes, gross consumer surplus). The analysis appeals—implicitly or explicitly—to the concept of efficiency derived from general equilibrium models. Using the tax‐reform methodology, it is shown in a simple general equilibrium model that, if the second‐best outcome is not the first‐best one, the sum of consumer plus producer surplus cannot lead an economy to its true second‐best optimum.

Agricultural pollution and regulation: How to subsidize agriculture?

Privacy protection tools can be characterised by the number of parties that have to cooperate so that the tools work and achieve the desired effect [Pfi01]: Some privacy protection tools can be used stand-alone, without the need for the cooperation of other parties. Others require that the communication partners use the same tools. Some tools only function when being supported by an appropriate infrastructure that quite often is currently not in place.

Despite the many advantages of cloud computing, keeping information in such an environment increases the risk of cyber attacks, as well as the possibility of unauthorized access by cloud provider employees. Another critical concern is privacy protection, since depending on data access control, confidential information may be exposed even through authorized access. To solve these issues we have previously proposed Vallum, a platform that leverages Intel SGX protection to ensure the security, confidentiality, and integrity of data at rest and during processing. It also provides tools for privacy protection, following policies set by the data owner. In this demo we present Vallum-Med, an application of Vallum for the protection of medical patient personal data, including imaging results of their cardiac examinations. We will demonstrate that this system fully supports cloud protection of such sensitive data as well as the definition of privacy policies and ensuring that all results of queries are compliant to these policies. All processing, data storage and network traffic are protected using SCONE, a docker container-based technology for seamlessly incorporating SGX protection for applications, which provides a fully encrypted memory environment.