participant consent and withdrawal when using publicly archived data

Participant Consent and Withdrawal when using publicly archived data

Ansgar Koene, Elvira Perez, Christopher J. Carter, Ramona Statache, Svenja Adolphs, Claire O’Malley, Tom

Rodden, and Derek McAuley

HORIZON Digital Economy Research, University of Nottingham

Article 12:

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

• Public/private data

• Privacy: expressed concerns vs. expressed behaviour

• Interim summary

• Conditions for consent

Overview

Public/Private: People may operate in public spaces but maintain strong

perceptions or expectations of privacy. They may acknowledge that the substance of their

communication is public, but that the specific context in which it appears implies restrictions on how that information is -- or ought to be -- used by other parties.

Social, academic, or regulatory delineations of public and private as a clearly recognizable binary no longer holds in everyday practice.

AoIR Ethics Working Committee (version 2.0)

• Unless consent has been sought, observation of public behaviour needs to take place only in public situations where those observed ‘would expect to be observed by strangers’.

• It is not always easy to determine which online spaces people perceive as 'private' or 'public'

• Participants may consider their publicly accessible internet activity to be private despite agreeing to the site User License Agreements.

• Communication may have been private when it was first conducted, even if it is now publicly available.

BPS: Ethics Guidelines forInternet-Mediated Research (IMR)

MRS Delphi Group Report: Private Lives? (2015)

Most people do not “live up to their self-reported privacy preferences”.

Even privacy conscious individuals are likely to share sensitive information with strangers, in particular online.

Applying the “revealed preferences” theory, this and similar evidence has been used to argue that our society, quite simply, does not place much value on privacy.

Reported preferences vs. behaviour

Spiekermann et al. (2001)

Communication on the Internet has characteristics that are different from communication in other channels (Boyd, 2008):

Persistence: postings on the Internet are automatically registered and stored;

Replicability: content in digital form can be duplicated without cost;

Invisible audiences: we do not know who sees our postings. Searchability: content in the networked public sphere is very

easily accessible by conducting a search.

People therefore do not have an intuitive sense about the level of privacy that they should expect from internet communication

Factors affecting user behaviour and expectations of privacy

Preferences about privacy may critically depend on the context and in particular on initial endowment.

People would like to have more control over their privacy, but since they know that companies already have access to their data, they don't bother to try an make an effort to maintain privacy.

When consumers feel that their privacy is protected, they might value it much more than when they feel their data has already been, or may be, revealed.

Fatalistic behaviour

Acquisti et al. (2009)

Online privacy

• Surveys show that people indicate desire for data privacy

• People exhibit a lack of privacy enforcing behaviour

• Expectation of loss of privacy results in 'why bother trying'

• Probably also a lack of intuitive understanding of nature of Internet communications

• OK, but under what conditions would people feel good about giving their data for research?

Interim summary

Factors affecting consent

• Purpose: obtain first-hand data concerning conditions under which participants would willing consent to having their data used for research purposes

• Targeted at a wide cross-section of the population

• Recruitment to take place via announcements in mass-media (press releases)

Questionnaire study regarding conditions for consent

How do required conditions for consent change as function of:

Participant demographics The type of social network platform The type of organization doing the study The type of question being studied

Specific research questions

1)Gender2)Age3)Country/Region of residence4)Highest level of education5)Current employment6)Income bracket

7)Political spectrum most closely identified with

8)Level of political engagement

9)Level of computer literacy

Participant demographics

Primary Social Media platform used by participant 1) Blog2) Microblogging (e.g. Twitter)3) Social Network sites (e.g. Facebook)

Platform & Organization

Organization doing the study1) Academic2) Corporate 3) Government4) Third-sector

Academic & Third-sector style questions: Study about estimating psychological traits of social media

users based on their postings.

Study related to prevalence and types of cyber-bullying

Linguistics study about context dependent changes in word usage

Study to identify indicators of mental health problems through social media communication patterns

Comparison of work/school related communications on public and private social media platforms

Study on information propagation through friend networks


Corporate questions: Analysis of advertising efficiency based on identifying how

and when products are talked about on social media

Analysis of social media posts to improve targeted advertising

Government questions: Study to track if and how a government initiated media

campaign on healthy living is responded to on social media

Study to track how different political parties are commented on in social media, as part of election polling


Know enough about the researchers so I can trust them (e.g. background and motivations)

Clearly understand what the study is about

Clearly know which data the study will analyze

Have clear information about how the data will be analyzed

Have clear information about how the results will be reported

Am given pre-publication access to the results

Am paid for my data

Conditions for consent

Will there again be a large disparity between survey answers and actual behaviour?

Self-selection bias of survey responders.

Responses depend so heavily on specific research question, that result can not generalize.

Concerns/criticisms of study

Internet users exhibit complex, context dependent opinons and behaviour regarding desired privacy, which can not be derived from theoretical first-principles.

It is therefore necessary to collect direct survey responses to determine which data can be safely assumed to be 'public'.

Conclusions

What the public doesn't know doesn't hurt them. It's OK to collect data about people without their

consent, as long as you don't publish it. Two arguments that GCHQ/NSA strongly endorse

Final thoughts

Thank you

For more information on this topic, visit http://casma.wp.horizon.ac.uk/

Solzhenitsyn