Project Grant 2237328

This $100,000 project grant from the National Science Foundation's Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences program will fund research to understand the impact of privacy interventions on the online publishing ecosystem. The three-year award to the New Jersey Institute of Technology will support studies of how publishers comply with and implement privacy regulations, how users respond to new privacy tools, and the effects on user engagement, publisher revenues from online advertising, and data value allocation across stakeholders. Key activities include developing an application programming interface for automated compliance auditing of publisher systems, analyzing user behavior in response to privacy mechanisms, and investigating the consequences of privacy initiatives on metrics such as user experience and publisher financial outcomes. Insights from the research aim to inform policymakers, practitioners, and scholars about balancing privacy protections with sustainability of digital content and services.