Towards a Utility Theory of Privacy and Information Sharing

Abstract

Sustainability management has originally and—to this day—primarily been focused on environmental aspects. Today, enormous data storage capacities and computational power in the e-big data era have created unforeseen opportunities for big data hoarding corporations to reap hidden benefits from an individual's information sharing, which occurs bit by bit over time. This article presents a novel angle of sustainability, which is concerned with sensitive data protection given by the recently detected trade-off predicament between privacy and information sharing in the digital big data age. When individual decision makers face the privacy versus information sharing predicament in their corporate leadership, dignity and utility considerations could influence risk management and sustainability operations. Yet, to this day, there has not been a clear connection between dignity and utility of privacy and information sharing as risk management and sustainability drivers. The chapter unravels the legal foundations of dignity in privacy but also the behavioral economics of utility in communication and information sharing in order to draw a case of dignity and utility to be integrated into contemporary corporate governance, risk management and sustainability considerations of e-innovation.