APIs continued

Dad Joke

I married my wife for her looks.

But not the ones she’s been giving me lately!

Housekeeping

• Self-assessment reflection + proposal

Working with online data

• Save the raw data
• Make your process as reproducible as possible

Limitations of online data

• Found, not made
• Missing (sometimes invisibly)
• Can result from changing/hidden processes

Code Challenge Review

Ethics Discussion

Vitak, J., Shilton, K., & Ashktorab, Z. (2016). Beyond the Belmont Principles: Ethical Challenges, Practices, and Beliefs in the Online Data Research Community. Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, 941–953.

Ethics in online data

• Some dangers
  • Privacy
  • Transparency
    • Data is “exhaust” and people may not know it exists
    • What is “public” data? Expected audiences may differ greatly
    • Informed consent is difficult
  • Unintended consequences
    • Data can be aggregated or used by bad actors
    • Salganik gives 18 examples of states using population data for genocide/forced migration

Ethics in online data

• More dangers!
  • Data release
    • Data can be “de-anonymized”
    • NYC taxi data
    • ZIP + birthdate + gender is enough for ~1/3 of people
  • Generalization
    • Twitter users != all people
    • Most active users != all users

Balance is needed

What are the dangers of too much caution? > - Emotional contagion as example case

Some principles

• Respect for persons, beneficence, justice, respect for law, and public interest
• Think through possible harms to participants and the systems
• Do work that has benefits
• Consult with others
• Assume that data is sensitive
• Aggregate when possible
• Notify participants of data collection and obtain consent when possible
• Alter quotes/usernames
• Share research with participants