The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) grants all natural persons the right to access their personal data if this is being processed by data controllers. The data controllers are obliged to share the data in an electronic format and often provide the data in a so called Data Download Package (DDP). These DDPs contain all data collected by public and private entities during the course of a citizens’ digital life and form a treasure trove for social scientists. However, the data can be deeply private. To protect the privacy of research participants while using their DDPs for scientific research, we developed a de-identification algorithm that is able to handle typical characteristics of DDPs. These include regularly changing file structures, visual and textual content, differing file formats, differing file structures and private information like usernames. We investigate the performance of the algorithm and illustrate how the algorithm can be tailored towards specific DDP structures.

Highlights d Software that allows for privacy-preserving analysis of digital trace data d Participants can give true informed consent regarding data they share with researchers d The software is provided via open source d The software can be tailored toward different research questions or data sources

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) grants all natural persons the right of access to their personal data if this is being processed by data controllers. The data controllers are obliged to share the data in an electronic format and often provide the data in a so called Data Download Package (DDP). These DDPs contain all data collected by public and private entities during the course of citizens' digital life and form a treasure trove for social scientists. However, the data can be deeply private. To protect the privacy of research participants while using their DDPs for scientific research, we developed de-identification software that is able to handle typical characteristics of DDPs such as regularly changing file structures, visual and textual content, different file formats, different file structures and accounting for usernames. We investigate the performance of the software and illustrate how the software can be tailored towards specific DDP structures.

We present PORT, a software platform for local data extraction and analysis of digital trace data. While digital trace data collected by private and public parties hold a huge potential for social-scientific discovery, their most useful parts have been unattainable for academic researchers due to privacy concerns and prohibitive API access. However, the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) grants all citizens the right to an electronic copy of their personal data. All major data controllers, such as social media platforms, banks, online shops, loyalty card systems and public transportation cards comply with this right by providing their clients with a 'Data Download Package' (DDP). Previously, a conceptual workflow was introduced allowing citizens to donate their data to scientific-researchers. In this workflow, citizens' DDPs are processed locally on their machines before they are asked to provide informed consent to share a subset of the processed data with the researchers. In this paper, we present the newly developed software PORT that implements the local processing part of this workflow, protecting privacy by shielding sensitive data from any contact with outside observers -including the researchers themselves. Thus, PORT enables a host of potential applications of social data science to hitherto unobtainable data.