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Accounting for Privacy in Citizen Science: Ethical Research in a Context of Openness
Abstract
In citizen science, volunteers collect and share data with researchers, other volunteers, and the public at large. Data shared in citizen science includes information on volunteer location or other sensitive personal information; yet, volunteers do not typically express privacy concerns. This study uses the framework of contextual integrity to understand privacy accounting in the context of citizen science, by analyzing contextual variables including roles; information types; data flows and transmission principles; and, uses, norms, and values. Findings show that uses, norms, and values-including core values shared by researchers and public volunteers, and the motivations of individual volunteers' have a significant impact on privacy accounting. Overall, citizen science volunteers and practitioners share and promote openness and data sharing over protecting privacy. Studying the context of citizen science offers an example of contextually-appropriate data sharing that can inform broader questions about research ethics in an age of pervasive data. Based on these findings, this paper offers implications for designing data and information flows and supporting technologies in public and voluntary data sharing projects.
... Over the past few decades, technological developments have facilitated significant growth in our ability to conduct and document observations through citizen science, bringing new challenges to information management and associated privacy (Bowser et al. 2017). We are witnessing exponential growth in community-generated data, information, knowledge, and wisdom arising from citizen science (Follett and Strezov 2015). ...
... Such engagement offers great potential benefit for both science and society through learning, participation, and action (Brossard et al. 2005;Crall et al. 2012;Frensley et al. 2017;Mathews 2014;Newman et al. 2017;Newman et al. 2012;Theobald et al. 2015). At the heart of the growing citizen science movement are deeply rooted and contextually appropriate values related to information sharing and use, as is evident from recent research (Bowser et al. 2017) and the increasing popularity of open science, open access, open source, and crowdsourcing movements. Yet, risks are also created by these new approaches and technologies as people, their actions, and their data become more visible and vulnerable (Bowser et al. 2017). ...
... At the heart of the growing citizen science movement are deeply rooted and contextually appropriate values related to information sharing and use, as is evident from recent research (Bowser et al. 2017) and the increasing popularity of open science, open access, open source, and crowdsourcing movements. Yet, risks are also created by these new approaches and technologies as people, their actions, and their data become more visible and vulnerable (Bowser et al. 2017). Tensions arise between the value of information sharing and open access on one hand, and respect for the privacy and sensitivity of information on the other. ...
Involving the public in scientific discovery offers opportunities for engagement, learning, participation, and action. Since its launch in 2007, the CitSci.org platform has supported hundreds of community-driven citizen science projects involving thousands of participants who have generated close to a million scientific measurements around the world. Members using CitSci.org follow their curiosities and concerns to develop, lead, or simply participate in research projects. While professional scientists are trained to make ethical determinations related to the collection of, access to, and use of information, citizen scientists and practitioners may be less aware of such issues and more likely to become involved in ethical dilemmas. In this era of big and open data, where data sharing is encouraged and open science is promoted, privacy and openness considerations can often be overlooked. Platforms that support the collection, use, and sharing of data and personal information need to consider their responsibility to protect the rights to and ownership of data, the provision of protection options for data and members, and at the same time provide options for openness. This requires critically considering both intended and unintended consequences of the use of platforms, data, and volunteer information. Here, we use our journey developing CitSci.org to argue that incorporating customization into platforms through flexible design options for project managers shifts the decision-making from top-down to bottom-up and allows project design to be more responsive to goals. To protect both people and data, we developed—and continue to improve—options that support various levels of “open” and “closed” access permissions for data and membership participation. These options support diverse governance styles that are responsive to data uses, traditional and indigenous knowledge sensitivities, intellectual property rights, personally identifiable information concerns, volunteer preferences, and sensitive data protections. We present a typology for citizen science openness choices, their ethical considerations, and strategies that we are actively putting into practice to expand privacy options and governance models based on the unique needs of individual projects using our platform.
... Crowdsourcing and citizen science projects with large data collection components have raised privacy concerns related to protecting participants' identities and the location of potentially vulnerable ecological resources [109]. Although concerns over privacy are not new, there are fresh considerations related to the ease with which study participants' location can be tracked and identified due to smartphone and mapping technologies, presenting potential safety risks. ...
... One research study by Bowser et al. (2017) suggests that participants in citizen science projects value the sharing of data and personal information over protecting their personal privacy, and that in general people who volunteer for citizen science projects may have fewer privacy concerns than other members of the general public [109]. However, Bowser et al. (2017) find that citizen scientists are less likely to be comfortable sharing some types of data than others, specifically information on children, streaming data, and constant location tracking data [109]. ...
... One research study by Bowser et al. (2017) suggests that participants in citizen science projects value the sharing of data and personal information over protecting their personal privacy, and that in general people who volunteer for citizen science projects may have fewer privacy concerns than other members of the general public [109]. However, Bowser et al. (2017) find that citizen scientists are less likely to be comfortable sharing some types of data than others, specifically information on children, streaming data, and constant location tracking data [109]. ...
... The goal of ensuring participants' privacy is noted in citizen science literature [17]. Nevertheless, only one study so far has empirically investigated the issue of privacy with citizen science volunteers: Bowser et al. [3] conducted focus groups and semi-structured interviews with fourteen experienced citizen scientists and thirteen citizen science coordinators. These authors found that the experienced citizen scientists who took part in their study prioritised openness and sharing over privacy. ...
... Our choice to study the role of motivational cues and existing privacy concerns will enable us to investigate the degree to which participants can be 'swayed' to contribute data. Moreover, we aim to compare the disclosure behaviour of 'dabblers' to the disclosure behaviour of top contributors studied by Bowser et al. [3] who found that the strong motivation to participate in citizen science observed among top contributors can override the privacy concerns they might otherwise hold. We decided to examine the impact of these privacy concerns and motivational cues against two types of data: neutral and sensitive. ...
... While this calculation is easy to observe and manipulate in the private sector (for example a certain amount of money or a free service can be offered in exchange for personal data), the voluntary context of citizen science prompts the study of how non-monetary rewards may impact data disclosure decisions. Discussing the results of their study, Bowser et al. [3] brought to attention the link between what citizen scientists perceived as rewards of participation, and the disclosure decisions they made while taking part in citizen science projects. Although the role of motivation in citizen science has been the focus of many investigations, the study conducted by Bowser et al. is the first to empirically establish a link between the motivation of a citizen scientist to participate in a project and their willingness to part with personal data. ...
Recent scandals involving data from participatory research have contributed to broader public concern about online privacy. Such concerns might make people more reluctant to participate in research that asks them to volunteer personal data, compromising many researchers' data collection. We tested several motivational messages that encouraged participation in a citizen science project. We measured people's willingness to disclose personal information. While participants were less likely to share sensitive data than neutral data, disclosure behaviour was not affected by attitudes to privacy. Importantly, we found that citizen scientists who were exposed to a motivational message that emphasised 'learning' were more likely to share sensitive information than those presented with other types of motivational cues. Our results suggest that priming individuals with motivational messages can increase their willingness to contribute personal data to a project, even if the request pertains to sensitive information.
... On a similar note, Jay et al. [39] found that contribution rates to VCS projects can be significantly increased by allowing citizen scientists to contribute without registering for a designated citizen science project. Addressing the data privacy concerns in citizen science, Bowser et al. [3] report that values and norms of citizen science explicitly promote data sharing to achieve a greater good. The examples outlined above all focus on topics that do not pose an immediate threat to the individual citizen scientist or the society as a whole (e.g. ...
... While increased participation is essential for the success of VCS, developers acting on behalf of trusted institutions should be aware of their responsibility for the users who trust the institutions represented by the developers. Bowser et al. [3] refer to this problematic priming on openness in the context of citizen science with suggesting that volunteers may not raise privacy concerns on their own. 6.2.3 Fostering Community Support. ...
With the rise of COVID-19 cases globally, many countries released digital tools to mitigate the effects of the pandemic. In Germany the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) published the Corona-Data-Donation-App, a virtual citizen science (VCS) project, to establish an early warning system for the prediction of potential COVID-19 hotspots using data from wearable devices. While work on motivation for VCS projects in HCI often presents egoistic motives as prevailing, there is little research on such motives in crises situations. In this paper, we explore the socio-psychological processes and motivations to share personal data during a pandemic. Our findings indicate that collective motives dominated among app reviews (n=464) and in in-depth interviews (n=10). We contribute implications for future VCS tools in times of crises that highlight the importance of communication, transparency and responsibility.
... As custodians of large European citizen science datasets, we are supportive of the principle of open data. However, as this is a rapidly developing and uncertain area (e.g., Borgman, 2012;Bowser, Shilton, Preece, & Warrick, 2017;Reichman et al., 2011;Roche et al., 2014;Mills et al., 2015;Whitlock et al., 2016), we wish to highlight potential risks to the maintenance of dynamic and robust citizen science biodiversity monitoring schemes if mandatory PDA is the key mechanism for facilitating open data. ...
... Concerns that open access to data about rare or threatened species can put conservation objectives at risk may lead volunteers to withhold data from schemes that contribute to public archives (Eaton et al., 2015;Yang & Chan, 2015). PDA of citizen science data may also conflict with aspects of volunteer identity and privacy (Bowser et al., 2017). While knowing the identity of submitting individuals is essential for verification and allows observer effects to be modelled, if not carefully managed, it may lead to individual movements or residential addresses being inferred. ...
1.Public data archiving (PDA) is widely advocated as a means of achieving open data standards, leading to improved data preservation, increased scientific reproducibility and transparency, as well as additional data use. 2.PDA was primarily conceived to archive data from short‐term, single‐purpose scientific studies. It is now more widely applied, including to large‐scale citizen science biodiversity recording and monitoring schemes which combine the efforts of volunteers with professional scientists. 3.This may affect the financial security of such schemes by reducing income from data and analytical services. Communication between scheme organizers and researchers may be disrupted, reducing scientific quality and impeding scheme development. It may also have an impact on the participation of some volunteers. 4.Synthesis and applications. In response to the challenges of PDA for citizen science biodiversity recording and monitoring schemes, the archive function of scheme organisations should be better recognised by those promoting open data principles. Increased financial support from the public sector or from commercial or academic data users may offset financial risk. Those in favour of public data archiving should do more to facilitate communication between non‐scheme users and the originating schemes, whilst a more flexible approach to data archiving may be required to address potential impacts on volunteer participation. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
... One of these is privacy, and the exposure of contributing citizen scientists' personal information. Bowser et al. (2017) point to location privacy as a particularly important issue: participants in projects like eBird tag their sightings of birds with longitude and latitude co-ordinates. Across a number of postings, it is possible to work out both spatial and temporal components of people's movements. ...
... Across a number of postings, it is possible to work out both spatial and temporal components of people's movements. Bowser et al. report one contributor to a citizen science project writing that "someone will inadvertently put a comment to say, "temperature was 79 degrees, and by the way this is my last report for the next week because I'm going out of town" (Bowser et al., 2017(Bowser et al., , p. 2131. Of course, between this information and the contributor's contribution history on the project, some potentially undesirable people could work out where their unoccupied house was. ...
Crowdsourcing psychometric data is common in areas of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) such as information visualization, text entry, and interface design. In some of the social sciences, crowdsourcing data is now considered routine, and even standard. In this chapter, we explore the collection of data in this manner, beginning by describing the variety of approaches can be used to crowdsource data. Then, we evaluate past literature that has compared the results of these approaches to more traditional data-collection techniques. From this literature, we synthesize a set of design and implementation guidelines for crowdsourcing studies. Finally, we describe how particular analytic techniques can be recruited to aid the analysis of large-scale crowdsourced data. The goal of this chapter it to clearly enumerate the difficulties of crowdsourcing psychometric data and to explore how, with careful planning and execution, these limitations can be overcome.
... e.g., Seti@Home [6] and Test4Theory [5]. The volunteer computing projects requires a complex setting of server-client deployment models [52,31] and have many security and privacy concerns [20,32,22,21]. Due to these constraints, a large-scale volunteer computing projects that are set-up using BOINC [1] and IBM World Community Grid [15], are only a few. ...
In the last few years, contributions of the general public in scientific projects has increased due to the advancement of communication and computing technologies. Internet played an important role in connecting scientists and volunteers who are interested in participating in their scientific projects. However, despite potential benefits, only a limited number of crowdsourcing based large-scale science (citizen science) projects have been deployed due to the complexity involved in setting them up and running them. In this paper, we present CitizenGrid - an online middleware platform which addresses security and deployment complexity issues by making use of cloud computing and virtualisation technologies. CitizenGrid incentivises scientists to make their small-to-medium scale applications available as citizen science projects by: 1) providing a directory of projects through a web-based portal that makes applications easy to discover; 2) providing flexibility to participate in, monitor, and control multiple citizen science projects from a common interface; 3) supporting diverse categories of citizen science projects. The paper describes the design, development and evaluation of CitizenGrid and its use cases.
... To date, most research on social norms in CSCW and related fields was done in the context of virtual reality [73], massive multiplayer-online games [18,31], online communities [9], and smart glasses [16]. Thus far, the research on normative aspects of augmented reality is scant. ...
Novel collaborative technologies afford new modes of behavior, which are often not regulated by established social norms. In particular, shared augmented reality (AR) - where multiple users can create, attach, and interact with the same virtual elements embedded into the physical environment – has the potential to interrupt current social norms of behavior. The objective of our study is to shed light on the ways in which shared AR challenges existing behavioral expectations. Using a simulated lab experimental design, we performed a study of users’ interactions in a shared AR setting. Content analysis of participants’ interviews reveals users’ concerns over the preservation of their self- and social identity, as well as concerns related to personal space and the sense of psychological ownership over one’s body and belongings. Our findings also point to the need for regulation of shared AR spaces and design of the technology’s control mechanisms.
... To date, most research on social norms in CSCW and related fields was done in the context of virtual reality [73], massive multiplayer-online games [18,31], online communities [9], and smart glasses [16]. Thus far, the research on normative aspects of augmented reality is scant. ...
Novel collaborative technologies afford new modes of behavior, which are often not regulated by established social norms. In particular, shared augmented reality (AR) - where multiple users can create, attach, and interact with the same virtual elements embedded into the physical environment - has the potential to interrupt current social norms of behavior. The objective of our study is to shed light on the ways in which shared AR challenges existing behavioral expectations. Using a simulated lab experimental design, we performed a study of users' interactions in a shared AR setting. Content analysis of participants' interviews reveals users' concerns over the preservation of their self- and social identity, as well as concerns related to personal space and the sense of psychological ownership over one's body and belongings. Our findings also point to the need for regulation of shared AR spaces and design of the technology's control mechanisms.
... Ethical practices and protocols for researchers and practitioners who collect crowdsourced data are also an important topic for discussion and debate on privacy. Bowser et al. (2017) reported on the attitudes of researchers engaged in crowdsourcing that are dominated by an ethic of openness. This, in turn, encourages crowdsourcing volunteers to share their information and makes them focus on the personal and collective benefits that motivate and accompany participation. ...
Data are essential in all areas of geophysics. They are used to better understand and manage systems, either directly or via models. Given the complexity and spatiotemporal variability of geophysical systems (e.g., precipitation), a lack of sufficient data is a perennial problem, which is exacerbated by various drivers, such as climate change and urbanization. In recent years, crowdsourcing has become increasingly prominent as a means of supplementing data obtained from more traditional sources, particularly due to its relatively low implementation cost and ability to increase the spatial and/or temporal resolution of data significantly. Given the proliferation of different crowdsourcing methods in geophysics and the promise they have shown, it is timely to assess the state of the art in this field, to identify potential issues and map out a way forward. In this paper, crowdsourcing-based data acquisition methods that have been used in seven domains of geophysics, including weather, precipitation, air pollution, geography, ecology, surface water, and natural hazard management, are discussed based on a review of 162 papers. In addition, a novel framework for categorizing these methods is introduced and applied to the methods used in the seven domains of geophysics considered in this review. This paper also features a review of 93 papers dealing with issues that are common to data acquisition methods in different domains of geophysics, including the management of crowdsourcing projects, data quality, data processing, and data privacy. In each of these areas, the current status is discussed and challenges and future directions are outlined.
... Elmi cəhətdən verilənləri kimin təqdim etdiyinin məlum olması vacib olduğu üçün, əksər layihələr könüllünün adını onun təqdim etdiyi verilənlərlə əlaqələndirir. Bu cür informasiyanın göstərilməsi barədə seçimdən asılı olaraq layihə koordinatorları könüllülərə hər iki seçimianonim identifikasiya və ya öz istifadəçi adlarını yaratmağı təklif edirlər [8]. ...
... On the principle of that the highest level of protection should be offered, citizen scientists should have their privacy looked after through adopting best practices such as Privacy-By-Design [Jerusalem Resolution on Privacy By Design, 2010] and coherence with emerging legal standards [European Parliament and European Council, 2016]. Having said this, above this baseline we also note that in contrast to normative scientist-subject experimental designs, the participatory and community-building nature of citizen science may also support negotiation and discussion of the costs and benefits of privacy issues and that it might be possible to establish more nuanced "contextually-appropriate" norms agreeable to all than would be the case in a normal laboratory setting [Bowser et al., 2017]. ...
We discuss the potential application to virtual citizen science of a recent standard (BS ISO 27500:2016 "The human-centred organisation") which encourages the adoption of a sociotechnical systems perspective across a wide range of businesses, organizations and ventures. Key tenets of the standard concern taking a total systems approach, capitalizing on individual differences as a strength, making usability and accessibility strategic objectives, valuing personnel and paying attention to ethical and values-led elements of the project in terms of being open and trustworthy, social responsibility and health and wellbeing. Drawing upon our experience of projects in our laboratory and the wider literature, we outline the principles identified in the standard and offer citizen science themed interpretations and examples of possible responses.
... Further to these concerns about the impact and reusability of data, we also note ethical concerns stemming from the inconsistent documentation and contextualisation of data. Prior research has demonstrated that citizen volunteers generally support openness and demonstrate a willingness to share potentially sensitive data as long as it is for scientific research purposes (Bowser et al., 2017). Even so, analyses of biodiversity datasets suggest that the availability of volunteer-derived datasets does not adequately match the desires and motivations of volunteers and indeed is often not recognised by potential end-users of the data (Groom et al., 2017). ...
Citizen Science-public participation in scientific projects-is becoming a global practice engaging volunteer participants, often non-scientists, with scientific research. Citizen Science has already considerable support from various professional networks and policy makers, since it is effective in enabling a wider participation and access to increased resources and fostering public engagement and awareness. At the same time, Citizen Science is facing major challenges, such as quality and consistency, to reap open the full potential of its outputs and outcomes, including data, software, and results. In this context, the principles put forth by Data Science and Open Science domains are essential for alleviating these challenges, which have been addressed at length in these domains. In order to explore the extent to which Citizen Science initiatives capitalise on Data Science and Open Science principles, we analysed 48 Citizen Science projects focusing on pollution and its effects through a set of Data Science and Open Science indicators. The results indicate several shortcomings with respect to commonly accepted Data Science principles, including lack of a clear definition of research problems and limited description of data management and analysis processes, and Open Science principles, including lack of the necessary contextual information for reusing project outcomes. In the light of this analysis, we provide a set of guidelines and recommendations for better adoption of Data Science and Open Science principles in Citizen Science projects, and introduce a software tool to support this adoption, with a focus on preparation of data management plans in Citizen Science projects.
... Due to the importance of participants' motivation in creating large quantities of accurate information, design antecedents focused on motivation have received the most attention, including design features that support promotion of collective goals, ability to interact and make friends, rewards, and game-like features (Elevant 2013;Eveleigh et al. 2013;Nov et al. 2011;Prestopnik et al. 2013;Prestopnik and Crowston 2011). It can also offer a setting for research on participatory design ( Bowser et al. 2017;Lukyanenko et al. 2016b;Preece et al. 2016), another major IS topic (Bodker 1996;Bratteteig and Wagner 2014;Garrity 2001;Klein and Hirschheim 2001;Kyng 1995). ...
The rapid proliferation of online content producing and sharing technologies resulted in an explosion of user-generated content (UGC), which now extends to scientific data. Citizen science, in which ordinary people contribute information for scientific research, epitomizes UGC. Citizen science projects are typically open to everyone, engage diverse audiences, and challenge ordinary people to produce data of highest quality to be usable in science. This also makes citizen science a very exciting area to study both traditional and innovative approaches to information quality management. With this paper we position citizen science as a leading information quality research frontier. We also show how citizen science opens a unique opportunity for the information systems community to contribute to a broad range of disciplines in natural and social sciences and humanities.
... For example, in their study of a citizen science project, Bowser et al. found that the norm of "openness" is defned by those who feel that people who are "extremely privacy-conscious" simply cannot contribute and prompts the authors to label the community as a "selfselecting" group. [4]. ...
Anonymity can enable both healthy online interactions like support-seeking and toxic behaviors like hate speech. How do online service providers balance these threats and opportunities? This two-part qualitative study examines the challenges perceived by open collaboration service providers in allowing anonymous contributions to their projects. We interviewed eleven people familiar with organizational decisions related to privacy and security at five open collaboration projects and followed up with an analysis of public discussions about anonymous contribution to Wikipedia. We contrast our findings with prior work on threats perceived by project volunteers and explore misalignment between policies aiming to serve contributors and the privacy practices of contributors themselves.
... Initiative features that operationalize a philosophy of openness might have the effect of limiting participation to those who have fewer privacy concerns. Alternatively, participants might be aware of potential privacy intrusions but be more willing to risk them in exchange for the potential social and scientific benefits that they believe are facilitated by public data sharing [52]. Consideration of these privacy narratives in the context of genomic citizen science merits special attention given the need for diverse participation in biomedical research to increase the generalizability of results, yet also growing awareness of the potential secondary uses of personal genetic data to, among other things, discriminate against individuals or identify them or their genetic relatives as criminal suspects. ...
Background:
Citizen science is increasingly prevalent in the biomedical sciences, including the field of human genomics. Genomic citizen science initiatives present new opportunities to engage individuals in scientific discovery, but they also are provoking new questions regarding who owns the outputs of the research, including intangible ideas and discoveries and tangible writings, tools, technologies, and products. The legal and ethical claims of participants to research outputs become stronger-and also more likely to conflict with those of institution-based researchers and other stakeholders-as participants become more involved, quantitatively and qualitatively, in the research process. It is not yet known, however, how genomic citizen science initiatives are managing the interests of their participants in accessing and controlling research outputs in practice. To help fill this gap, we conducted an in-depth review of relevant policies and practices of U.S.-based genomic citizen science initiatives.
Methods:
We queried the peer-reviewed literature and grey literature to identify 22 genomic citizen science initiatives that satisfied six inclusion criteria. A data collection form was used to capture initiative features, policies, and practices relevant to participants' access to and control over research outputs.
Results:
This analysis revealed that the genomic citizen science landscape is diverse and includes many initiatives that do not have institutional affiliations. Two trends that are in apparent tension were identified: commercialization and operationalization of a philosophy of openness. While most initiatives supported participants' access to research outputs, including datasets and published findings, none supported participants' control over results via intellectual property, licensing, or commercialization rights. However, several initiatives disclaimed their own rights to profit from outputs.
Conclusions:
There are opportunities for citizen science initiatives to incorporate more features that support participants' access to and control over research outputs, consistent with their specific objectives, operations, and technical capabilities.
... In addition, researchers who interviewed project coordinators and conducted a focus group with volunteers attending a citizen science networking event heard that citizen science is "dominated by an ethic of openness" and that citizen scientists value and take pride in broad data sharing. 28 In sum, when citizen scientists address data sharing in normative terms, they support it and do so using language that suggests a strong affinity to open science. Implicit Ethical Commitments. ...
As citizen science expands, questions arise regarding the applicability of norms and policies created in the context of conventional science. This article focuses on data sharing in the conduct of health-related citizen science, asking whether citizen scientists have obligations to share data and publish findings on par with the obligations of professional scientists. We conclude that there are good reasons for supporting citizen scientists in sharing data and publishing findings, and we applaud recent efforts to facilitate data sharing. At the same time, we believe it is problematic to treat data sharing and publication as ethical requirements for citizen scientists, especially where there is the potential for burden and harm without compensating benefit.
... Many solutions, such as location obscuration or masking PII, were designed to protect the privacy of humans and/or sensitive species. Further, at least a handful of the projects that did not leverage these solutions had thought about implications like privacy and made a deliberate decision to prioritize, for example, principles like notice and informed consent (see also Bowser et al. 2017). ...
This article offers an assessment of current data practices in the citizen science, community science, and crowdsourcing communities. We begin by reviewing current trends in scientific data relevant to citizen science before presenting the results of our qualitative research. Following a purposive sampling scheme designed to capture data management practices from a wide range of initiatives through a landscape sampling methodology (Bos et al. 2007), we sampled 36 projects from English-speaking countries. The authors used a semi-structured protocol to interview project proponents (either scientific leads or data managers) to better understand how projects are addressing key aspects of the data lifecycle, reporting results through descriptive statistics and other analyses. Findings suggest that citizen science projects are doing well in terms of data quality assessment and governance, but are sometimes lacking in providing open access to data outputs, documenting data, ensuring interoperability through data standards, or building robust and sustainable infrastructure. Based on this assessment, the paper presents a number of recommendations for the citizen science community related to data quality, data infrastructure, data governance, data documentation, and data access.
The rapid proliferation of online content producing and sharing technologies resulted in an explosion of user-generated content (UGC), which now extends to scientific data. Citizen science, in which ordinary people contribute information for scientific research, epitomizes UGC. Citizen science projects are typically open to everyone, engage diverse audiences, and challenge ordinary people to produce data of highest quality to be usable in science. This also makes citizen science a very exciting area to study both traditional and innovative approaches to information quality management. With this paper we position citizen science as a leading information quality research frontier. We also show how citizen science opens a unique opportunity for the information systems community to contribute to a broad range of disciplines in natural and social sciences and humanities.
Ubiquitous networked data collection and algorithm-based information systems have the potential to disparately impact lives around the planet and pose a host of emerging ethical challenges. One response has been a call for more transparency and democratic control over the design and implementation of such systems. This scoping mapping review focuses on participatory approaches to the design, governance, and future of these systems across a wide variety of contexts and domains.
The functionality available on modern ‘smartphone’ mobile devices, along with mobile application software and access to the mobile web, have opened up a wide range of ways for volunteers to participate in environmental and biodiversity research by contributing wildlife and environmental observations, geospatial information, and other context-specific and time-bound data. This has brought about an increasing number of mobile phone based citizen science projects that are designed to access these device features (such as the camera, the microphone, and GPS location data), as well as to reach different user groups, over different project durations, and with different aims and goals. In this chapter we outline a number of key considerations when designing and developing mobile applications for citizen science, with regard to (1) Interoperability. The factors that influence the usability of the mobile application are covered in both (2) Participant Centred Design and Agile Development, and (3) User Interface and Experience Design. Finally, the factors that influence sustained engagement in the project are covered in (4) Motivational Factors for Participation.
This theoretical paper proposes a framework for how citizen science can be adapted to organizational contexts. Using an “input, process, output” approach, this model proposes organizational factors (e.g., communication channels and styles, and organizational structure) that should be considered when choosing among citizen science approaches (e.g., contributory, collaborative, co-created). The essay identifies possible outcomes for the individual, organization, and larger sector from employing a citizen science approach within an organizational setting.
Crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) are widely used by organizations, researchers, and individuals to outsource a broad range of tasks to crowd workers. Prior research has shown that crowdsourcing can pose privacy risks (e.g., de-anonymization) to crowd workers. However, little is known about the specific privacy issues crowd workers have experienced and how they perceive the state of privacy in crowdsourcing. In this paper, we present results from an online survey of 435 MTurk crowd workers from the US, India, and other countries and areas. Our respondents reported different types of privacy concerns (e.g., data aggregation, profiling, scams), experiences of privacy losses (e.g., phishing, malware, stalking, targeted ads), and privacy expectations on MTurk (e.g., screening tasks). Respondents from multiple countries and areas reported experiences with the same privacy issues, suggesting that these problems may be endemic to the whole MTurk platform. We discuss challenges, high-level principles and concrete suggestions in protecting crowd workers'; privacy on MTurk and in crowdsourcing more broadly.
The first goal of this chapter is to propose a slight re-framing of citizen science, which will contextualize
the information presented in the rest of the book. The authors propose a perspective on and a definition
for citizen science (which is alternative to the numerous previously documented definitions) as: “work
undertaken by civic educators together with citizen communities to advance science, foster a broad scientific
mentality, and/or encourage democratic engagement, which allows society to deal rationally with
complex modern problems”. By explaining the rationale behind this definition, the authors also hope to
raise awareness of the role that the meaning of words and phrases (semantics) plays in understanding
and supporting citizen science. A second goal of this chapter is to explain how different organizations
already use certain software solutions to organize knowledge about citizen science, how these systems
can be classified and how they can facilitate or impede interoperability – the ability of humans and
machines to pass information between each other.
Research on newcomer roles in peer production sites (e.g., Wikipedia) is characterized by a broad and relatively well articulated set of functionally and culturally recognizable roles. But not all communities come with well-defined roles that newcomers can aspire to occupy. The present study explores activity clusters newcomers create when faced with few recognizable roles to fill and limited access to other participantsâ work that serves as an exemplar. Drawing on a mixed method research design, we present findings from an analysis of 1,687 newcomersâ sessions in an online citizen science project. Our analysis revealed three major findings: (1) newcomersâ activities exists across six session types; (2) newcomers toggle between light work sessions and more involved types of production or community engagement; (3) high-level contributors contribute large volumes of work but comment very little and another group contributes large volumes of comments, but works very little. The former group draws heavily on posts contributed by the latter group. Identifying shifts and regularities in contribution facilitate improved mechanisms for engaging participants and for the design of online citizen science communities.
The prospect of newly-emerging, technology-enabled, unregulated citizen science health research poses a substantial challenge for traditional research ethics. Unquestionably, a significant amount of research ethics study is needed to prepare for the inevitable, widespread introduction of citizen science health research. Using the case study of mobile health (mHealth) research, this article provides an ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) research agenda for citizen science health research conducted outside conventional research institutions. The issues for detailed analysis include the role of IRBs, recruitment, inclusion and exclusion criteria, informed consent, confidentiality and security, vulnerable participants, incidental findings, and publication and data sharing.
The evolution of social technology and research methods present ongoing challenges to studying people online. Recent high-profile cases have prompted discussion among both the research community and the general public about the ethical implications of researching humans, their information, and their activities in large-scale digital contexts. Examples of scientific and market research involving Facebook users and OKCupid clients exemplify the ethical complexities of both studying and manipulating online user behavior. When does data science become human subjects research, and what are our obligations to these subjects as researchers? Drawing from previous work around the ethics of digital research, one goal of this workshop is to work towards a set of guiding principles for CSCW scholars doing research online.
The collaboration between laypeople and professional scientists known as “citizen science” is an important trend in research and data gathering. Citizen science offers important benefits to science and society. For example, citizens can help scientists with data collection and provide advice on research design and implementation. Citizens can also gain a better understanding of scientific concepts and methods. Additionally, citizens can help scientists better understand and address issues of concern to their families and communities. However, citizen science also raises ethical issues that should be addressed when projects begin and throughout the course of scientific investigation. To promote ethical research, scientists should develop guidelines for involvement of citizens in research, communicate effectively with participants and local communities at the outset of their involvement in research projects, carefully oversee their work, develop appropriate publication practices, and provide lay-volunteers with education and training on the responsible conduct of research. Researchers also need to be cognizant of clarifying these roles and responsibilities as well as promoting appropriate and safe citizen participation and transparency of the study methods, data analysis, and communication of results.
In most online citizen science projects, a large proportion of participants contribute in small quantities. To investigate how low contributors differ from committed volunteers, we distributed a survey to members of the Old Weather project, followed by interviews with respondents selected according to a range of contribution levels. The studies reveal a complex relationship between motivations and contribution. Whilst high contributors were deeply engaged by social or competitive features, low contributors described a solitary experience of 'dabbling' in projects for short periods. Since the majority of participants exhibit this small-scale contribution pattern, there is great potential value in designing interfaces to tempt lone workers to complete 'just another page', or to lure early drop-outs back into participation. This includes breaking the work into components which can be tackled without a major commitment of time and effort, and providing feedback on the quality and value of these contributions.
Across HCI and social computing platforms, mobile applications that support citizen science, empowering non-experts to explore, collect, and share data have emerged. While many of these efforts have been successful, it remains difficult to create citizen science applications without extensive programming expertise. To address this concern, we present Sensr, an authoring environment that enables people without programming skills to build mobile data collection and management tools for citizen science. We demonstrate how Sensr allows people without technical skills to create mobile applications. Findings from our case study demonstrate that our system successfully overcomes technical constraints and provides a simple way to create mobile data collection tools.
Privacy research has long focused on the individual. Yet most organizations are highly collaborative where teamwork is the norm. To examine privacy practices in collaborative settings, we conducted an ethnographic study of a highly collaborative and information-intensive setting -- an emergency Dept. (ED). We found that ED staff's work practices did not always align with the organization's privacy policies and procedures. We then discuss the use of workarounds when privacy policies interfere with work practices, the challenge of assigning accountability for enforcing privacy in collaborative environments, and implications for technical and policy design. We conclude with some thoughts on the future of privacy research in collaborative settings.
Making visible the process of user participation in online crowdsourced initiatives has been shown to help new users understand the norms of participation [2]. However, in many settings, participants lack full access to others' work. Merging the theory of legitimate peripheral participation [18] with Erickson and Kellogg's theory of social translucence [10, 11, 16] we introduce the concept of practice proxies: traces of user participation in online environments that act as resources to orient newcomers towards the norms of practice. Through a combination of virtual [14] and trace ethnography [12] we explore how new users in two online citizen science projects engage with these traces of practice as a way of compensating for a lack of access to the process of the work itself. Our findings suggest that newcomers seek out practice proxies in the social features of the projects that highlight contextualized and specific characteristics of primary work practice.
Article: http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4838/3802
The goal of this paper is to outline the laudable goals and ultimate failure of notice and choice to respect privacy online and suggest an alternative framework to manage and research privacy. This paper suggests that the online environment is not conducive to rely on explicit agreements to respect privacy. Current privacy concerns online are framed as a temporary market failure resolvable through two options: (a) ameliorating frictions within the current notice and choice governance structure or (b) focusing on brand name and reputation outside the current notice and choice mechanism. The shift from focusing on notice and choice governing simple market exchanges to credible contracting where identity, repeated transactions, and trust govern the information exchange rewards firms who build a reputation around respecting privacy expectations. Importantly for firms, the arguments herein shift the firm’s responsibility from adequate notice to identifying and managing the privacy norms and expectations within a specific context.
The effect of situational factors is largely ignored by current studies on information privacy. This paper theorized and empirically tested how an individual's decision-making on information disclosure is driven by competing situational benefits and risk factors. The results of this study indicate that, in the context of an e-commerce transaction with an unfamiliar vendor, information disclosure is the result of competing influences of exchange benefits and two types of privacy beliefs (privacy protection belief and privacy risk belief). In addition, the effect of monetary rewards is dependent upon the fairness of information exchange. Monetary rewards could undermine information disclosure when information collected has low relevance to the purpose of the e-commerce transaction.
Citizen science enlists the public in collecting large quantities of data across an array of habitats and locations over long spans of time. Citizen science projects have been remarkably successful in advancing scientific knowledge, and contributions from citizen scientists now provide a vast quantity of data about species occurrence and distribution around the world. Most citizen science projects also strive to help participants learn about the organisms they are observing and to experience the process by which scientific investigations are conducted. Developing and implementing public data-collection projects that yield both scientific and educational outcomes requires significant effort. This article describes the model for building and operating citizen science projects that has evolved at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology over the past two decades. We hope that our model will inform the fields of biodiversity monitoring, biological research, and science education while providing a window into the culture of citizen science.
Members of the public participate in scientific research in many different contexts, stemming from traditions as varied as participatory action research and citizen science. Particularly in conservation and natural resource management contexts, where research often addresses complex social–ecological questions, the emphasis on and nature of this participation can significantly affect both the way that projects are designed and the outcomes that projects achieve. We review and integrate recent work in these and other fields, which has converged such that we propose the term public participation in scientific research (PPSR) to discuss initiatives from diverse fields and traditions. We describe three predominant models of PPSR and call upon case studies suggesting that—regardless of the research context—project outcomes are influenced by (1) the degree of public participation in the research process and (2) the quality of public participation as negotiated during project design. To illustrate relationships between the quality of participation and outcomes, we offer a framework that considers how scientific and public interests are negotiated for project design toward multiple, integrated goals. We suggest that this framework and models, used in tandem, can support deliberate design of PPSR efforts that will enhance their outcomes for scientific research, individual participants, and social–ecological systems. [Open access: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol17/iss2/art29/ ]
Due to the ability of cell phone providers to use cell phone towers to pinpoint users’ locations, federal E911 requirements, the increasing popularity of GPS-capabilities in cellular phones, and the rise of cellular phones for Internet use, a plethora of new applications have been developed that share users’ real-time location information online [26]. This paper evaluates users’ risk and benefit perceptions related to the use of these technologies and the privacy controls of existing location-sharing applications. We conducted an online survey of American Internet users (n = 587) to evaluate users’ perceptions of the likelihood of several location-sharing use scenarios along with the magnitude of the benefit or harm of each scenario (e.g. being stalked or finding people in an emergency). We find that although the majority of our respondents had heard of location-sharing technologies (72.4%), they do not yet understand the potential value of these applications, and they have concerns about sharing their location information online. Most importantly, participants are extremely concerned about controlling who has access to their location. Generally, respondents feel the risks of using location-sharing technologies outweigh the benefits. Respondents felt that the most likely harms would stem from revealing the location of their home to others or being stalked. People felt the strongest benefit were being able to find people in an emergency and being able to track their children. We then analyzed existing commercial location-sharing applications’ privacy controls (n = 89). We find that while location-sharing applications do not offer their users a diverse set of rules to control the disclosure of their location, they offer a modicum of privacy.
Online citizen science projects engage volunteers in collecting, analyzing, and curating scientific data. Existing projects have demonstrated the value of using volunteers to collect data, but few projects have reached the full collaborative potential of scientists and volunteers. Understanding the shared and unique motivations of these two groups can help designers establish the technical and social infrastructures needed to promote effective partnerships. We present findings from a study of the motivational factors affecting participation in ecological citizen science projects. We show that volunteers are motivated by a complex framework of factors that dynamically change throughout their cycle of work on scientific projects; this motivational framework is strongly affected by personal interests as well as external factors such as attribution and acknowledgment. Identifying the pivotal points of motivational shift and addressing them in the design of citizen-science systems will facilitate improved collaboration between scientists and volunteers.
Social media is one way that individuals share information, present themselves, and manage their social interactions in both personal and professional contexts. While social media benefits have been examined in the literature, relatively little attention has been paid to the relationship of privacy to these benefits. Privacy has traditionally been framed as a way for individuals to protect themselves from the consequences of too much information disclosure. However, privacy can be a means to enhance social media outcomes and is essential for coordinating cooperative relationships. In this workshop we seek to: a) broaden the lens of social media privacy research to examine the benefits and outcomes of interactional privacy as they relate to social media goals; and b) discuss the design of social media interfaces that are responsive to both relational and privacy needs.
Technology-supported citizen science has created huge volumes of data with increasing potential to facilitate scientific progress, however, verifying data quality is still a substantial hurdle due to the limitations of existing data quality mechanisms. In this study, we adopted a mixed methods approach to investigate community-based data validation practices and the characteristics of records of wildlife species observations that affected the outcomes of collaborative data quality management in an online community where people record what they see in the nature. The findings describe the processes that both relied upon and added to information provenance through information stewardship behaviors, which led to improved reliability and informativity. The likelihood of community-based validation interactions were predicted by several factors, including the types of organisms observed and whether the data were submitted from a mobile device. We conclude with implications for technology design, citizen science practices, and research.
In most online citizen science projects, a large proportion of participants contribute in small quantities. To investigate how low contributors differ from committed volunteers, we distributed a survey to members of the Old Weather project, followed by interviews with respondents selected according to a range of contribution levels. The studies reveal a complex relationship between motivations and contribution. Whilst high contributors were deeply engaged by social or competitive features, low contributors described a solitary experience of 'dabbling' in projects for short periods. Since the majority of participants exhibit this small-scale contribution pattern, there is great potential value in designing interfaces to tempt lone workers to complete 'just another page', or to lure early drop-outs back into participation. This includes breaking the work into components which can be tackled without a major commitment of time and effort, and providing feedback on the quality and value of these contributions.
Citizen science broadly describes citizen involvement in science. Citizen science has gained significant momentum in recent years, brought about by widespread availability of smartphones and other Internet and communications technologies (ICT) used for collecting and sharing data. Not only are more projects being launched and more members of the public participating, but more human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers are focusing on the design, development, and use of these tools. Together citizen science and HCI researchers can leverage each other’s skills to speed up science, accelerate learning, and amplify society’s wellbeing globally as well as locally.This paper’s focus is on HCI and biodiversity citizen science as seen primarily through the lens of research in the author’s lab. The paper is framed around five topics: community, data, technology, design, and a call to save all species, including ourselves. The paper ends with a research agenda that focuses on these areas and identifies productive ways for HCI specialists, science researchers, and citizens to collaborate.In a nutshell, while species are disappearing at an alarming rate, citizen scientists who document species’ distributions help to support conservation and educate the public. HCI researchers can empower citizen scientists to dramatically increase what they do and how they do it.
We present five provocations for ethics, and ethical research, in HCI. We discuss, in turn, informed consent, the researcher-participant power differential, presentation of data in publications, the role of ethical review boards, and, lastly, corporate-facilitated projects. By pointing to unintended consequences of regulation and oversimplifications of unresolvable moral conflicts, we propose these provocations not as guidelines or recommendations but as instruments for challenging our views on what it means to do ethical research in HCI. We then suggest an alternative grounded in the sensitivities of those being studied and based on everyday practice and judgement, rather than one driven by bureaucratic, legal, or philosophical concerns. In conclusion, we call for a wider and more practical discussion on ethics within the community, and suggest that we should be more supportive of low-risk ethical experimentation to further the field.
Users increasingly use mobile devices to engage in social activity and commerce, enabling new forms of data collection by firms and marketers. User privacy expectations for these new forms of data collection remain unclear. A particularly difficult challenge is meeting expectations for contextual integrity, as user privacy expectations vary depending upon data type collected and context of use. This article illustrates how fine-grained, contextual privacy expectations can be measured. It presents findings from a factorial vignette survey that measured the impact of diverse real-world contexts (e.g., medical, navigation, music), data types, and data uses on user privacy expectations. Results demonstrate that individuals’ general privacy preferences are of limited significance for predicting their privacy judgments in specific scenarios. Instead, the results present a nuanced portrait of the relative importance of particular contextual factors and information uses, and demonstrate how those contextual factors can be found and measured. The results also suggest that current common activities of mobile application companies, such as harvesting and reusing location data, images, and contact lists, do not meet users’ privacy expectations. Understanding how user privacy expectations vary according to context, data types, and data uses highlights areas requiring stricter privacy protections by governments and industry. © 2016 Kirsten Martin and Katie Shilton Published with license by Taylor & Francis.
Pervasive information streams that document people and their routines have been a boon to social computing research. But the ethics of collecting and analyzing available—but potentially sensitive—online data present challenges to researchers. In response to increasing public and scholarly debate over the ethics of online data research, this paper analyzes the current state of practice among researchers using online data. Qualitative and quantitative responses from a survey of 263 online data researchers document beliefs and practices around which social computing researchers are converging, as well as areas of ongoing disagreement. The survey also reveals that these disagreements are not correlated with disciplinary, methodological, or workplace affiliations. The paper concludes by reflecting on changing ethical practices in the digital age, and discusses a set of emergent best practices for ethical social computing research.
This Review summarizes and draws connections between diverse streams of empirical research on privacy behavior. We use three themes to connect insights from social and behavioral sciences: people's uncertainty about the consequences of privacy-related behaviors and their own preferences over those consequences; the context-dependence of people's concern, or lack thereof, about privacy; and the degree to which privacy concerns are malleable—manipulable by commercial and governmental interests. Organizing our discussion by these themes, we offer observations concerning the role of public policy in the protection of privacy in the information age.
Copyright © 2015, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The evolving philosophies, methods, and products of CSCW design research are more collaborative and value-active than ever. Researchers and participants may co-construct designs, thus sharing power; they may share intimate life stories over design probes, thus pushing socio-cultural boundaries; they may seek personal fulfillment through the products or the process. How do these experiences affect researcher and co-creator identity in the moment of co-work? How do these changes reconfigure other relationships and encounters? This workshop invites discussants from across disciplines to consider phenomenological aspects of identity-making and to unpack ethical dilemmas that arise when we appreciate the potential for design research itself to significantly harm or help participants. At stake are CSCW policies, best practices, and collective understandings of what it means to be a design researcher.
Citizen science is a form of collaborative research engaging the public with professional scientists. Information and communication technologies (ICT) are a leading factor in the recent spread of this phenomenon. A common assumption is that money and ICT are the ideal solutions to issues of data quality and participant engagement. The reality is instead that resource limitations often require adopting suboptimal ICT, including tools that are "free as in puppies" with hidden costs from poor usability and lack of appropriate functionality.
A comparative case study of three citizen science projects, eBird, The Great Sunflower Project, and Mountain Watch, found that projects with few ICT resources employed a broader range of strategies to address these issues than expected. The most practical and effective strategies integrated available ICT with other resources to open up new solutions and options for supporting citizen science outcomes in spite of resource limitations.
Much privacy research focuses on concerns about data protection and has established metrics, such as privacy scales, for evaluating those concerns. Recent work recognizes the importance of understanding interpersonal and interactional privacy concerns in social media, but ways to measure privacy within these contexts remain unsettled. This workshop aims to cultivate an understanding of the current landscape for interpersonal privacy framework and ways to measure social privacy for networked settings. For full details, visit http://networkedprivacy2013.wordpress.com/
This paper examines how teens understand privacy in highly public networked environments like Facebook and Twitter. We describe both teens’ practices, their privacy strategies, and the structural conditions in which they are embedded, highlighting the ways in which privacy, as it plays out in everyday life, is related more to agency and the ability to control a social situation than particular properties of information. Finally, we discuss the implications of teens’ practices and strategies, revealing the importance of social norms as a regulatory force.(This paper was presented at Oxford Internet Institute’s “A Decade in Internet Time: Symposium on the Dynamics of the Internet and Society” on September 22, 2011.)
The era of Big Data has begun. Computer scientists, physicists, economists, mathematicians, political scientists, bio-informaticists, sociologists, and other scholars are clamoring for access to the massive quantities of information produced by and about people, things, and their interactions. Diverse groups argue about the potential benefits and costs of analyzing genetic sequences, social media interactions, health records, phone logs, government records, and other digital traces left by people. Significant questions emerge. Will large-scale search data help us create better tools, services, and public goods? Or will it usher in a new wave of privacy incursions and invasive marketing? Will data analytics help us understand online communities and political movements? Or will it be used to track protesters and suppress speech? Will it transform how we study human communication and culture, or narrow the palette of research options and alter what ‘research’ means? Given the rise of Big Data as a socio-technical phenomenon, we argue that it is necessary to critically interrogate its assumptions and biases. In this article, we offer six provocations to spark conversations about the issues of Big Data: a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon that rests on the interplay of technology, analysis, and mythology that provokes extensive utopian and dystopian rhetoric.
Citizen science is a form of research collaboration involving members of the public in scientific research projects to address real-world problems. Often organized as a virtual collaboration, these projects are a type of open movement, with collective goals addressed through open participation in research tasks. We conducted a survey of citizen science projects to elicit multiple aspects of project design and operation. We then clustered projects based on the tasks performed by participants and on the project's stated goals. The clustering results group projects that show similarities along other dimensions, suggesting useful divisions of the projects.
This article develops a unified framework, based on Rossi's factorial survey method, for studying positive beliefs and normative judgments. The framework enables estimation of individuals' positive-belief and normative-judgment equations, leading to analysis of the components of beliefs and judgments, assessment of interpersonal variability in the components, and estimation of two further equations, representing, respectively, the determinants and consequences of the components. We describe procedures for data collection, assemble a set of tools for estimating the positive-belief and normative-judgment equations and carrying out the corresponding homogeneity tests, and propose ways of estimating the determinants and consequences equations. To illustrate the framework, we investigate both a positive-belief equation (describing adolescents' views concerning determination of marital happiness) and a normative-judgment equation (describing judgments of the justice of earnings). This article thus provides a guide to contemporary factorial survey analysis, and points the way to its further development.
The legal and technical rules governing flows of information are out of balance, argues Julie E. Cohen in this original analysis of information law and policy. Flows of cultural and technical information are overly restricted, while flows of personal information often are not restricted at all. The author investigates the institutional forces shaping the emerging information society and the contradictions between those forces and the ways that people use information and information technologies in their everyday lives. She then proposes legal principles to ensure that people have ample room for cultural and material participation as well as greater control over the boundary conditions that govern flows of information to, from, and about them.
Internet technology holds significant potential to respond to business, educational, and social needs, but this same technology poses fundamentally new challenges for research ethics. To reason about ethical questions, researchers and ethics review boards typically rely on dichotomies like "public" versus "private," "published" vs. "unpublished," and "anonymous" vs. "identified." However, online, these categories are blurred, and the underlying concepts require reinterpretation. How then are we to reason about ethical dilemmas about research on the Internet? To date, most work in this area has been grounded in a combination of theoretical analysis and experience gained by people in the course of conducting Internet research. In these studies, ethical insight was a welcome byproduct of research aimed primarily at exploring other ends. However, little work has used experimental methods for the primary purpose of contributing to our reasoning about the ethics of research online. In this paper, we discuss the role of empirical data in helping us answer questions about Internet research ethics. As an example, we review results of one study in which we gauged participant expectations of privacy in public chatrooms (Hudson & Bruckman, 2004b). Using an experimental approach, we demonstrate how participants' expectations of privacy conflict with the reality of these public chatrooms. Although these empirical data cannot provide concrete answers, we show how they influence our reasoning about the ethical issues of obtaining informed consent.
The management of group context in socially mediating technologies is an important challenge for the design community. To better understand how users manage group context, we explored the practice of multiple profile management in social media. In doing so, we observed creative and opportunistic strategies for group context management. We found that multiple profile maintenance is motivated by four factors: privacy, identity, utility, and propriety. Drawing on these motives, we observe a continuum of boundary regulation behaviors: pseudonymity, practical obscurity, and transparent separation. Based on these findings, we encourage designers of group context management systems to more broadly consider motives and practices of group separations in social media. Group context management systems should be privacy-enhancing, but a singular focus on privacy overlooks a range of other group context management practices.
In this article we present an empirical study aimed at better understanding the potential for harm when conducting research in chatrooms. For this study, we entered IRC chatrooms on the ICQ network and posted one of three messages to tell participants that we were recording them: a recording message, an opt-in message, or an opt-out message. In the fourth condition, we entered the cha- troom but did not post a message. We recorded and analyzed how subjects responded to being studied. Results of a regression analysis indicate significantly more hostility in the three conditions where we said something than in the control condition. We were kicked out of 63.3% of the chatrooms we entered in the three message con- ditions compared with 29% of the chatrooms in the control con- dition. There were no significant differences between any of these three conditions. Notably, when given a chance to opt in, only 4 of 766 potential subjects chose to do so. Results also indicate signifi- cant effects for both size and the number of moderators. For every 13 additional people in a chatroom, the likelihood getting kicked out was cut in half. While legal and ethical concerns are distinct, we conclude by arguing that studying chatrooms constitutes hu- man subjects research under U.S. law, but that a waiver of consent is appropriate in most cases as obtaining consent is impracticable.
Privacy is one of the most urgent issues associated with information technology and digital media. This book claims that what people really care about when they complain and protest that privacy has been violated is not the act of sharing information itselfâmost people understand that this is crucial to social life âbut the inappropriate, improper sharing of information. Arguing that privacy concerns should not be limited solely to concern about control over personal information, Helen Nissenbaum counters that information ought to be distributed and protected according to norms governing distinct social contextsâwhether it be workplace, health care, schools, or among family and friends. She warns that basic distinctions between public and private, informing many current privacy policies, in fact obscure more than they clarify. In truth, contemporary information systems should alarm us only when they function without regard for social norms and values, and thereby weaken the fabric of social life.
It's not privacy, and it's not fair. Stanford Law Review Online 66
- Cynthia Dwork
- Deirdre Mulligan
Cynthia Dwork and Deirdre Mulligan. 2013. It's not
privacy, and it's not fair. Stanford Law Review Online
66.35, 35-40.
k-anonymity: a model for protecting privacy, International Journal of Uncertainty, Fuzziness and Knowledge-Based Systems, v.10 n
- Latanya Sweeney