Privacy and ethical challenges in social network research

PRISONER is a tool designed to help researchers interact more ethically with social media data: it is concerned with Ethics (communicate clearly to participants how your experiment handles their data, and minimise and sanitise their data so you only see what you need), Reproducibility (archive and share your experimental workflows and data), and Extensibility (the softaware is free and open-source, building a community of developers).

See http://prisoner.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/ for more information.

Social network sites (SNSs) such as Facebook and Twitter attract hundreds of millions of users each month. Studying these services provides lots of insights into how communities and society communicate and behave, opening a wide range of research directions. The study of SNSs, however, raises a number of ethical questions: are their data fair game for researchers? Should people whose data have been used be considered participants? What are the potential privacy risks of using these data?

In this talk, I will discuss some examples of controversial SNS experiments, and introduce some recent work we have undertaken to improve the ethical conduct of such studies, particularly concerning the acquisition of consent in large-scale studies, and a tool we are developing (PRISONER) to help manage the ethical requirements of SNS experiments and to protect the privacy of participants.