Sandra Matz

Who they are

Her Columbia faculty page lists her as Lulu Chow Wang Professor of Business in the Management Division at Columbia Business School. In chapter 8 of Mindmasters, "We Need More Than Control", she describes an experiment in which more than 1,500 people decided whether to sell their personal data for real money (pp. 159 to 160). Seventy-five per cent said they were concerned about privacy, 85 per cent sold anyway, and five ways of giving people insight into their data made no difference against a control. The study is unpublished and the book gives no citation for it. She reports it as a failure and changes a policy position she says she previously held.

Her conclusion is that transparency and control are not enough, and that control works less as a right than as a responsibility placed on each person. Chapter 9, "Creating a Better Data Ecosystem", proposes system-level measures such as opt-in defaults.

Key papers

Matz, S. (2025). Mindmasters: The Data-Driven Science of Predicting and Changing Human Behavior. Harvard Business Review Press.

Matz, Gladstone and Stillwell (2016). "Money buys happiness when spending fits our personality." Psychological Science, 27. Listed on her Columbia faculty page; not read for this page.

Key ideas

Individual control cannot carry the weight of data protection on its own. See The Privacy Paradox.

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