[Air-L] About social media data availability

[Marcela Canavarro]

Hello!

Modern data protection laws rule that anonimyzed data is when the person is
not identified OR identifiable. You can say that, given available means
today, you cannot guarantee that the individuals cannot be identifiable
through data inference.

Check out GDPR - the European Data Protection law - and LGPD - the
Brazilian one. They both define anonymized data in that way.  It is also a
good idea to check how the californian data protection act treat this topic.

Also, there is a famous study where a huge anonymized data set was openly
available and it took just a few hours for many people to be identified
through data inference.  It might be a nice context for your argument.

I hope that helps.

Marcela.



Em quinta-feira, 17 de novembro de 2022, Dr. Emma Briant via Air-L <
air-l at listserv.aoir.org> escreveu:

> Hi there,
> It sounds a very reasonable concern. I would just explain this in a written
> response to that point in the reviewer’s comments. You don’t necessarily
> need to do everything each reviewer says, you just need to address their
> concern, show you’ve considered it and explain why you chose to do what you
> did, that you have good reason for taking this approach.
> Best of luck,
> Emma
>
> On Thu, 17 Nov 2022 at 20:17, Xanat Meza via Air-L <
> air-l at listserv.aoir.org>
> wrote:
>
> > Hello everyone!
> > I have a situation with some social media data we collected for a paper
> > that is currently under revision.
> > The situation is complex because we collected this data from a Facebook
> > group dedicated to a rare medical condition back in 2017, when social
> media
> > data rules were not as strict as they are now. When we requested ethics
> > review from our institution, they even told us we did not have to do
> > anything in particular and got the study approval without much
> difficulty.
> > Therefore, we requested permission to the group administrators to collect
> > posts, posted a permission request for the group members, asking them to
> > send us a message if they wished to opt out from the study, and collected
> > one thousand posts by hand. We noted that there were many researchers in
> > this group and that the members participated in surveys and medical
> studies
> > frequently and with enthusiasm, so we thought at that time that an
> > opting-out format would be enough. The data basically consists on user
> > name, the texts in the posts, date and time of the posts, number of
> > replies, and reactions. We separated the user names and replaced them
> with
> > alphanumeric codes.
> > Now, a reviewer of our paper is insisting that we MUST share this data
> > openly because it is anonymized. However, we think that it should be
> > available upon request, as social media data management has become
> stricter
> > in recent years, particularly on the case of data from vulnerable
> > communities. If we place this data related to a rare medical condition in
> > an open repository, even people who are not researchers may have access
> to
> > it and use it to bully this Facebook group, even if in theory, they could
> > not target specific users.
> > Does anyone have any ideas or advise on how we can respond politely to
> > this reviewer that it is safer for everyone to keep the data available
> upon
> > request?
> > Xanat V. Meza
> >
> > Ph.D. Kansei, Behavioral and Brain SciencesUniversity of Tsukuba
> > M.A. Media and Communication
> > Yeungnam University
> > B.D. Graphic Communication Design
> > Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana
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> --
> Dr Emma L Briant
>
> Owner: Maven of Persuasion LLC
> Fellow at Central European University's Center for Media, Data and Society
> Associate at University of Cambridge, Center for Financial Reporting &
> Accountability
> Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/emmalbriant
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>
> Author of: *Propaganda and Counter-Terrorism: Strategies for Global
> Change *from
> Manchester University Press
> Co-Author of: *Bad News for Refugees* with Prof. Greg Philo and Dr. Pauline
> Donald from Pluto Press.
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