OSD2F: An Open-Source Data Donation Framework

Abstract

The digital traces that people leave through their use of various online platforms provide tremendous opportunities for studying human behavior. However, the collection of these data is hampered by legal, ethical, and technical challenges. We present a framework and tool for collecting these data through a data donation platform where consenting participants can securely submit their digital traces. This approach leverages recent developments in data rights that have given people more control over their own data, such as legislation that now mandates companies to make digital trace data available on request in a machine-readable format. By transparently requesting access to specific parts of this data for clearly communicated academic purposes, the data ownership and privacy of participants is respected, and researchers are less dependent on commercial organizations that store this data in proprietary archives. In this paper we outline the general design principles, the current state of the tool, and future development goals.

Happiness and Sadness in Adolescents’ Instagram Direct Messaging: A Neural Topic Modeling Approach

“…At the end of the project, all remaining adolescents were asked if they wanted to donate their Instagram DDPs, which 102 adolescents did. For more information about DDPs, see the works by van Driel et al (2022) and Araujo et al (2022). This study used the DMs from the DDPs and well-being data from 12 biweekly surveys.…”

“…A promising methodology that allows researchers to obtain insights into adolescents’ social media content is social media data download packages (DDPs) (Araujo et al, 2022; van Driel et al, 2022). DDPs are the personal archives of social media users that contain all their social media data stored by the platform in question.…”

Happiness and Sadness in Adolescents’ Instagram Direct Messaging: A Neural Topic Modelling Approach

“…At the end of the project, all remaining adolescents were asked if they wanted to donate their Instagram DDPs, which 102 adolescents did. For more information about DDPs, see van Driel et al (2022) and Araujo et al (2022). The current study used the DMs from the DDPs and wellbeing data from 12 biweekly surveys.…”

“…A promising methodology that allows researchers to obtain insights into adolescents' social media content are social media data donation packages (Araujo et al, 2022;van Driel et al, 2022). Data donation packages (DDPs) are the personal archives of social media users that contain all their social media data stored by the platform in question.…”

Four grand challenges for video game effects scholars: How digital trace data can improve the way we study games

“…This has gained popularity in technologybased research, especially since the introduction of updated Data Protection Regulations (GDPR in the EU, APPI in Japan, etc) which allow users to make so-called subject data access requests. Such regulations have given more power to the user, creating more of a user-centric culture within academic work (Araujo et al, 2022). This can allow research teams to collect higher quality data in larger quantities, ultimately speeding up science and broadening its impact (Preece, 2016).…”