Tawei (David) Wang, "The Invisible Risks: An Empirical Analysis on Data Sharing Activities and Systemic Risk among the Data Brokers"

Summary: Data brokers are the major players in the market of collecting, selling, and sharing online user information. Although their practices have raised tremendous privacy concerns, their data collection and sharing activities are still under the veil. The growth of adverse cybersecurity incidents toward the data brokers has led the regulators, including California and Vermont, to require the data brokers to register and disclose their activities. This paper analyzes the leaked information on the dark web to analyze the data sharing and collection activities among the data brokers. In specific, we cluster the data brokers based on their data collection activities given by their product description to quantify the activity proximity. Next, we empirically examine how activity proximity leads to co-occurrence on the leaked information in the dark web. We further discuss the deterrence effect of the data broker registration on information leakage. Our study contributes to cybersecurity assurance and risk assessment literature by unveiling the shadowy data-collecting and data-sharing market.