Prof. Johnson gave the opening talk in our Cyber Alliance speaker series 2020-21 (Sept 9) on the intended & unintended consequences of the GDPR. Click to view the video recording.
The talk centered on Prof. Johnson’s paper showing how the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) reduced data sharing online, but had the unintended consequence of increasing market concentration among technology vendors that provide support services to websites. Websites that would face greater penalties under the GDPR dropped more vendors, and were more likely to drop smaller vendors. Increased concentration predominantly arose among vendors that use personal data such as cookies, and from the increased relative shares of Facebook and Google-owned vendors, but not from website consent requests. This suggests that increases in concentration are driven by website vendor choices rather than changes in user behavior.
Bio: Garrett Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Questrom School of Business, Boston University. Garrett Johnson researches digital marketing: measuring its effectiveness and examining its privacy issues. His ad effectiveness research uses large-scale experiments to measure how and how much ads work. His privacy research both examines the impact of Europe’s GDPR and studies the policy trade-offs in online behavioral targeting.
