[Air-L] WeChat/Skype ethical issues

[Loretta Anthony-Okeke]

Dear colleagues,
 
My name is Loretta and I am a Senior Tutor at the University of Manchester. I am currently supervising a number of Chinese Master’s students for their dissertation projects. Most of them want to either go to China and conduct face-to-face interviews with Chinese research participants in China, or remain in the UK and conduct online interviews with the same sample using WeChat, Skype.
 
The former is usually deemed medium-risk (i.e. related to research outside the EU/EEA, in countries with travel advisory, etc.) but with new data protection guidelines in the UK (GDPR and all), university ethics committee is now classifying audio/video data collected through these online mediums as medium-risk as well, even when the data is collected here in the UK.
 
I am hoping that you can advise on how students might enhance data protection as they outline the main ethical issues with this aspect of their research design? Is it wishful thinking that there might be a way data collection through Skype/WeChat can be assessed to be low-risk? 
 
Many thanks.
 
Best wishes,
 
Loretta Anthony-Okeke