Online, we humans are paradoxical: We cherish privacy, but freely disclose our personal information in certain contexts. Privacy economics offers a powerful lens to understand this paradox, and the field has been spearheaded by Alessandro Acquisti and his colleagues' analyses of how we decide what to share online and what we get in return.

His team's surprising studies on facial recognition software showed that it can connect an anonymous human face to an online name -- and then to a Facebook account -- in about 3 seconds. Other work shows how easy it can be to find a US citizen's Social Security number using basic pattern matching on public data. Work like this earned him an invitation to testify before a US Senate committee on the impact technology has on civil liberties.

Read about his work in the New York Times »