Public attitudes to reported instances of personal data usage

#AnalyzeMyDataA Twitter campaign based survey experiment

Ansgar Koene Horizon Digital Economy Research,

University of Nottingham

CaSMa: Citizen-centric approached to Social Media analysis•Ethics of internet mediate research•Citizen perspective on data usage methods

• Conditions for consent• Attitude to reports of questionable data use

BPS: Ethics Guidelines for Internet-Mediated Research

•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’.

Context

AoIR Ethics Working Committee

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

perceptions or expectations of privacy. The substance of a communication may be public, but the

context might imply restrictions on how that information ought to be used.

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

• The Internet has characteristics that are different from communication in other channels (Boyd, 2008):

Persistence Replicability Invisible audiences Searchability

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

Factors affecting behaviour and expectations of privacy

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

• Targeted at a wide cross-section of the population• How do 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

http://casma.wp.horizon.ac.uk/casma-projects/ccasmd

Questionnaire regarding conditions for consent

N=29, (52%F, 35%M, 13%Not specified), mean age:32,politics: 75% centre/left-of-centre, 21% prefer not to specifySM use: 82% daily or more

General consent:

Background and motivation of researcher:

Preliminary results

Academic Corporate Government NGO

Always 58.6 25.5 17.2 27.6Conditional 41.4 65.5 69 69

Never 0 9 13.8 3.4

Academic Corporate Government NGOHigh importance

44.8 72.4 72.4 79.3

Information about analysis method:

Information about how results will be reported:

Am paid for my data:

Preliminary results

Importance Academic Corporate Government NGO

High 34.5 55.2 48.3 51.7medium 48.3 31 41.4 31

Importance Academic Corporate Government NGO

High 48.3 55.2 58.6 51.7medium 27.6 24.1 27.6 31

Importance Academic Corporate Government NGO

High/medium 20.6 44.8 24.1 20.7Low/irrelevant 79.4 55.2 75.9 79.3

• Initial participant recruitment:– www.callforparticipants.com– Mailing lists: AiR-L; Horizon – Mention + link in article in

‘the Conversation’• Responses=29

Problem: How to reach a large enough broad spectrum audience

3285 article views

• Since Twitter is an ‘open broadcast’ style social media platform it has the potential for anyone to find the tweets.

• More than 1 in 5 people in UK use Twitter (2013 report by eMarketer)

• We are running a parallel project to develop a Public Outreach Evaluation Tool for Twitter.

Increase survey visibility via Twitter - #AnalyzeMyData

• Build momentum through sustained campaign– minimum of 1 Tweet/day for at least 1 month

• Increase visibility through use of #tags– #AnalyzeMyData, for people to find the campaign– Also include existing related #tags (#privacy, #data, etc)

• Refer to specific instances of questionable data access that were reported in the media

• Encourage participation via mini-surveys that link to larger survey

• Maintain blog pages that list items from the campaign + results

Twitter campaign design

• The mini-survey design was tested by posting on the Zooniverse discussion forum [with admin permission]

Test of mini-surveys

• Date 28 January = Data Privacy/Protection Day• University press release• Pre-notification to journalists (the Guardian, BBC, Channel4,

Slate, TechCrunch, HuffingtonPost)– 3 journalists replied to express interest in the topic area, 1

called to ask for further details to pitch to his editors– None of them picked up the story

• Requested help via AiR-L & Horizon mailing lists for disseminating the campaign (February 1st)

• Used re-tweets to add #Privacy, #data, #personaldata, #PrivacyDay, #digital, #digitalrights

Campaign launch

Campaign launch

Examples of campaign tweets

Campaign results

• Total conversions into mini-survey responses: 16

• Total conversions into responses to main survey: 0• CaSMa Twitter

+9 followers after announcement on AiR-L +22 followers at end of campaign

Survey responses from campaign

2 Consent to monitor fitness1 Consent to use Social Media profiles for games5 Consent to have e-mail analysed for ads3 Consent to experiment for Facebook Newsfeed3 Consent to for journalists to use Social Media posts1 Consent to analyse phone GPS1 Consent for Government to use social networks data for crime investigations

• Twitter is ‘broadcast’ but #tags and Followers are specific. – Run multiple parallel campaigns each targeting as a

specific segment.• Promoted tweets reach broad (impressions)

– Low yield (engagement) unless segment specific• Including known #tags increases impressions but unless

targeted, will be seen as noisy ads.• Research community in mailing lists is willing to help

promote short-targeted campaigns• Tweet embedded mini-surveys can work, link-following will

loose participants• Crafting a clear message + image + link in 140 characters is

difficult.

Conclusions/ lessons learnt

Thank you for your attention

Project blog: http://casma.wp.horizon.ac.ukTwitter: @CaSMaResearch