Presentation that was given at the 2015 British Association for Applied Linguisitcs workshop on research ethics.

1. 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

2. 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

3. • Public/private data
• Privacy: expressed concerns vs. expressed behaviour
• Interim summary
• Conditions for consent
Overview

4. 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)

5. • 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 for
Internet-Mediated Research (IMR)

6. MRS Delphi Group Report: Private Lives? (2015)

7. MRS Delphi Group Report: Private Lives? (2015)

8.  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)

9. 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

10. MRS Delphi Group Report: Private Lives? (2015)

11.  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)

12. MRS Delphi Group Report: Private Lives? (2015)

13. 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

14. Factors affecting consent

15. • 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

16. 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

17. 1)Gender
2)Age
3)Country/Region of residence
4)Highest level of education
5)Current employment
6)Income bracket
1)Political spectrum most closely identified
with
2)Level of political engagement
1)Level of computer literacy
Participant demographics

18. Primary Social Media platform used by participant
1) Blog
2) Microblogging (e.g. Twitter)
3) Social Network sites (e.g. Facebook)
Platform & Organization
Organization doing the study
1) Academic
2) Corporate
3) Government
4) Third-sector

19. 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
Specific research questions

20. 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
Specific research questions

21.  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

22.  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

23.  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

24.  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

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