Raveesh Maya New York University, da Stern School of Business, vai apresentar o seu trabalho de investigação.

Privacy Spillovers across Competing Platforms

This paper investigates privacy spillovers, a phenomenon where privacy enhancing policies by one platform impact competing platforms. This phenomenon occurs when “multihoming” suppliers—who straddle multiple environments—make cross-platform adjustments to their data practices in response to a policy change by one platform. Smartphone platforms are a perfect setting to study privacy spillovers due to intensity of fine-grained sensitive data collection, major policy changes and high incidence of developer multihoming. Specifically, we investigate spillovers on Android in the context of iOS App Tracking Transparency (ATT) policy, which restricts third-party data collection on iOS. ATT’s influence on Android may manifest in either direction because of conflicting incentives for developers. Developers might uniformly adopt stricter privacy measures across all platforms to streamline operations. Conversely, developers might compensate for iOS data-collection restrictions by adopting more privacy-intrusive practices on Android. By contrasting the strategies by apps that are available on both iOS and Android with apps that are only available on Android, we document a notably positive spillover effect: multihoming apps significantly enhance app utility, evidenced by an increased adoption of feature enhancement third-party services and non-intrusive permissions. Furthermore, we note a strategic shift away from collecting and analyzing user data using third-party services. Consequently, multihoming apps witness significant increases in user ratings on Android marketplace post-ATT. Finally, these data-collection and utility improvements further fortify multihoming apps’ market positioning, inadvertently affecting Android’s market structure. We discuss practical implications for competing platforms.