Reciprocal privacy invasion and taxation of online map services

This paper considers privacy invasion, such as Street View, resulting from map services on the Internet. Reciprocal privacy invasion can develop into a Prisoners’ Dilemma. A portal site remedies such a dilemma by supplying personal information. However, under excessive supply, the problem worsens with negative utility. Whether such a situation develops or not is dependent on the cost of using a service and the coverage of information. We consider two types of taxation, on personal information and advertisements, in order to bring about a social optimum. Furthermore, we obtain a condition in which taxation brings about large tax revenues to be redistributed to privacy-encroached agents.