Call for Papers: Special issue on the monetization of personal data

Over the last recent years, much attention has been paid to government surveillance and in particular to the collection and storage of tremendous amounts of information in the name of national security. However, most people are not aware of another serious and subtle threat to their privacy, posed by hundreds of less known companies, called data brokers, doing profit by gathering, aggregating, analyzing, hoarding, commodifying, trading, or using personal data without knowledge or consent of the data subjects.

Quite recently, we are witnessing the emergence of new business models aiming to shift the balance of power between users and the companies that harvest information. Led by DataCoup and DataWallet, several start-ups have begun offering users the possibility to sell their social-networks data directly to businesses and advertisers. While these new brokers may empower users to monetize their personal information, the prospect of people selling data directly to these companies poses a myriad of new problems for their owners. How should they manage the sale of their data? How should they decide which elements must be offered up for mining and which ones retained? How valuable is their data? What is a good deal?

This special issue will highlight major achievements and latest advances in this interdisciplinary research field. We aim to gather cutting-edge contributions both from academia and industry. We invite high-quality submissions of original work not under review elsewhere, that substantiate their claims with empirical evidence. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, empirical and theoretical studies of:

● Economics of privacy and anonymity
● Measurement and quantification of privacy and security risks
● Economic models of data pricing
● Privacy and anonymity models
● Valuation of personal data
● Protocols and architectures for data-price negotiation
● Privacy-aware data monetization mechanisms
● Game-theoretic approaches to data monetization
● Privacy monitoring and auditing
● Algorithmic bias and price discrimination
● Behavioral advertising
● Impact on society and economy
● Privacy policy analysis
● Incentives for data disclosure
● Real-world experiences of privacy monetization


Submissions to this special issue must be done through the Editorial Manager platform (https://www.editorialmanager.com/ijis). Note that article type “S.I.: Personal Data Monetization” must be selected on the system in order to be considered for this special issue. When preparing their manuscript, authors are encouraged to adhere to the International Journal of Information Security guidelines. A guide for authors is available at the following URL: http://www.springer.com/computer/security+and+cryptology/journal/10207. All papers will be peer-reviewed, by following a regular reviewing procedure. Any further queries about this special issue should be sent to any of the Guest Editors.


Important Dates

Submission Deadline: 1 May 2019
First Editorial Decision: 1 August 2019
Acceptance Notification: 1 October 2019
Final Manuscript Due: 1 November 2019
Publication: Winter 2020

Guest Editors

Jorge Cuéllar, Siemens AG, Germany
jorge.cuellar@siemens.com

Nikolaos Laoutaris, Eurecat, Spain
nikos@datatransparencylab.org

Javier Parra-Arnau, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Spain
javier.parra@urv.cat

René Peralta, NIST, USA
rene.peralta@nist.gov

Ruben Rios, University of Malaga, Spain
ruben@lcc.uma.es