research-article

Public Access

Accounting for Privacy in Citizen Science: Ethical Research in a Context of Openness

Authors:

Elizabeth WarrickAuthors Info & Claims

CSCW '17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing

Pages 2124 - 2136

https://doi.org/10.1145/2998181.2998305

Published: 25 February 2017 Publication History

Abstract

In citizen science, volunteers collect and share data with researchers, other volunteers, and the public at large. Data shared in citizen science includes information on volunteer location or other sensitive personal information; yet, volunteers do not typically express privacy concerns. This study uses the framework of contextual integrity to understand privacy accounting in the context of citizen science, by analyzing contextual variables including roles; information types; data flows and transmission principles; and, uses, norms, and values. Findings show that uses, norms, and values-including core values shared by researchers and public volunteers, and the motivations of individual volunteers' have a significant impact on privacy accounting. Overall, citizen science volunteers and practitioners share and promote openness and data sharing over protecting privacy. Studying the context of citizen science offers an example of contextually-appropriate data sharing that can inform broader questions about research ethics in an age of pervasive data. Based on these findings, this paper offers implications for designing data and information flows and supporting technologies in public and voluntary data sharing projects.

References

[1]

Alessandro Acquisti, Laura Brandimarte, and George Loewenstein. 2015. Privacy and human behavior in the age of information. Science 347, 6221, 509--514.

[2]

Rick Bonney, Caren Cooper, Janice Dickinson, Steve Kelling, Tina Phillips, Kenneth Rosenberg, and Jennifer Shirk. 2009. Citizen science: A developing tool for expanding science knowledge and scientific literacy. Bioscience 59, 11, 977--84.

[3]

Anne Bowser and Andrea Wiggins. 2015. Privacy in participatory research: Advancing policy to support Human Computation. Human Computation 2, 1, 19--44.

[4]

danah boyd and Kate Crawford. 2012. Critical questions for big data. Information, Communication, and Society 15, 5, 662--679.

[5]

danah boyd and Alice E. Marwick. 2011. Social privacy in networked publics: Teens' attitudes, practices, and strategies. In A Decade in Internet Time: Symposium on the Dynamics of the Internet and Society. Oxford, UK: SSRN. Retrieved from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1925128}

[6]

Stacy Branham, Anja Thieme, Lisa Nathan, Steve Harrison, Deborah Tatar, and Patrick Olivier. 2014. Co-creating & Identity-making in CSCW: Revisiting ethics in design research. In Proceedings of the Companion Publication of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW 2014), 305--308.

Digital Library

[7]

Barry Brown, Alexandra Weilenmann, Donald McMillan, and Airi Lampinen. 2016. Five provocations for ethical HCI research. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16), 852--863.

Digital Library

[8]

Luigi Ceccaroni, Anne Bowser, and Peter Brenton. 2016. Civic education and citizen science: Definitions, categories, knowledge representation. In Luigi Ceccaroni and Jaume Piera (Eds.), Analyzing the Role of Citizen Science in Modern Research. IGI Global.

[9]

Julie Cohen. 2012. Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code, and the Play of Everyday Practice. Yale University Press.

[10]

Lorrie Faith Cranor, Patrick Kelley, Norman Sadeh, and Janice Tsai. 2010. Location-sharing technologies: Privacy risks and controls. Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society 6, 2, 1--26.

[11]

Cynthia Dwork and Deirdre Mulligan. 2013. It's not privacy, and it's not fair. Stanford Law Review Online 66.35, 35--40.

[12]

eBird. Explore Data. 2016. Retrieved May 20, 2016, from http://ebird.org/ebird/eBirdReports?cmd=Start

[13]

Alexandra Eveleigh, Charlene Jennett, Ann Blandford, Philip Brohan, and Anna L. Cox. 2014. Designing for dabblers and deterring drop-outs in citizen science. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '14), 2985--2994, http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2556288.2557262.

Digital Library

[14]

Casey Fiesler, Alyson Young, Tamara Peyton, Amy S. Bruckman, Mary Gray, Jeff Hancock, and Wayne Lutters. 2015. Ethics for studying online sociotechnical systems in a big data world. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference Companion on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW 2015), 289--292.

Digital Library

[15]

James Hudson and Amy Bruckman. 2005a. "Go away": Participant objections to being studied and the ethics of chatroom research. The Information Society, 20, 2, 127--139.

[16]

James Hudson and Amy Bruckman. 2005b. Using empirical data to reason about Internet research ethics. In H. Gellersen, K. Schmidt, M. Beaudouin-Lafon, & W. Mackay (Eds.), ECSCW 2005 (pp. 287--306). Springer Netherlands.

Digital Library

[17]

Alan Irwin. 1995. Citizen Science: A Study of People, Expertise, and Sustainable Development. Routledge.

[18]

Corey Jackson, Carsten Østerlund, Veronica Maidel, Kevin Crowston, and Gabriel Mugar. 2016. Which way did they go? Newcomer movement through Zooniverse. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW '16), 624--635.

Digital Library

[19]

Guillermina Jasso. 2006. Factorial survey methods for studying beliefs and judgements. Sociological Methods & Research 34, 3, 334--423.

[20]

Sunyoung Kim, Jennifer Mankoff, and Eric Paulos. 2013. Sensr: Evaluating a flexible framework for authoring mobile data-collection tools for citizen science. In Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '13), 1453--1462.

Digital Library

[21]

Han Li, Rathindra Sarathy, and Heng Xu. 2010. Understanding situational online information disclosure as a privacy calculus. Journal of Computer Information Systems 51, 1, 62.

[22]

Heather Richter Lipford, Pamela J. Wisniewski, Cliff Lampe, Lorraine Kisselburgh, and Kelly Caine. 2012. Reconciling privacy with social media. In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work Companion (CSCW '12), 19--20.

Digital Library

[23]

Kirstin Martin. 2013. Transaction costs, privacy, and trust: The laudable goals and ultimate failure of notice and choice to respect privacy online. First Monday 18, 12, online.

[24]

Kirsten Martin and Katie Shilton. 2016. Putting mobile application privacy in context: An empirical study of user privacy expectations for mobile devices. The Information Society 32, 3, 200--216.

Digital Library

[25]

Aleecia McDonald and Lorrie Faith Cranor. 2008. The cost of reading privacy policies. I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society 4, 543, 565.

[26]

Matthew Miles and Michael Huberman. 1994. Qualitative Data Analysis: An Expanded Sourcebook. SAGE Publications, Inc.

[27]

Gabriel Mugar, Carsten Østerlund, Katie DeVries Hassman, Kevin Crowston, and Corey Brian Jackson. 2014. Planet hunters and seafloor explorers: Legitimate peripheral participation through practice proxies in online citizen science. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW '14), 109--119.

Digital Library

[28]

Alison Murphy, Madhu Reddy, and Heng Xu. 2014. Privacy practices in collaborative environments: A study of emergency department staff. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW '14), 269--282.

Digital Library

[29]

Helen Nissenbaum. 2009. Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life. Stanford Law Books.

Digital Library

[30]

Xinru Page, Karen Tang, Fred Stutzman, and Airi Lampinen. 2013. Measuring networked social privacy. In Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work Companion (CSCW '13), 315--320.

Digital Library

[31]

Jennifer Preece. 2016. Citizen science: New research challenges in HCI. Int'l J. of Human-Computer Interaction 32, 8, 585--612.

[32]

David Resnik, Kevin Elliott, and Aubrey K. Miller. 2015. A framework for addressing ethical issues in citizen science. Environmental Science & Policy 54, 475--481.

[33]

Mark Rothstein, John T. Wilibanks, and Kyle B. Brothers. 2015. Citizen Science on your smartphone: An ELSI research agenda. Journal of Law, Medicine, & Ethics, 43.4, 898--903.

[34]

Dana Rotman, Jenny Preece, Jen Hammock, Kezee Procita, Derek Hansen, Cynthia Parr, Darcy Lewis, and David Jacobs. 2012. Dynamic changes in motivation in collaborative citizen-science projects. In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '12), 217--226.

Digital Library

[35]

Katie Shilton and Sheridan Sayles. 2016. "We aren't all going to be on the same page about ethics": Ethical practices and challenges in research on digital and social media. In Proceedings of the 2016 49th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS '16), 1909--1918.

Digital Library

[36]

Jennifer Shirk, et al. 2012. Public participation in scientific research: A framework for deliberate design. Ecology and Society 17, 2, 29--49.

[37]

Daniel Solove. 2008. Understanding Privacy. Harvard University Press.

[38]

Frederic Stutzman and Woodrow Hartzog. 2012. Boundary regulation in social media. In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '12), 769--778.

Digital Library

[39]

Brian Sullivan, et al. 2014. The eBird enterprise: An integrated approach to development and application of citizen science. Biological Conservation 169, 31--40.

[40]

Latanya Sweeney. 2002. K-anonymity: A model for protecting privacy. International Journal of Uncertainty, Fuzziness and Knowledge-Based Systems 10, 5, 557--570.

Digital Library

[41]

Jessica Vitak, Katie Shilton, and Zahra Ashktorab. 2016. Beyond the Belmont principles: Ethical challenges, practices, and beliefs in the online data research community. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2016), 941--953.

Digital Library

[42]

Andrea Wiggins. 2013. Free as in puppies: compensating for ICT constraints in citizen science. In Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '13), 1469--1480.

Digital Library

[43]

Andrea Wiggins and Kevin Crowston. 2012. Goals and tasks: Two typologies of citizen science projects. In Proceedings of the 45th Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science (HICSS '12), 3426--3433. http://

Digital Library

[44]

Andrea Wiggins and Yurong He. 2016. Communitybased data validation practices in citizen science. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW '16), 1548--1559.

Digital Library

Cited By

Piseddu TEnglund MBarquet K(2024)An assessment of potential improvements in social capital, risk awareness, and preparedness from digital technologiesNatural Hazards and Earth System Sciences10.5194/nhess-24-145-202424:1(145-161)Online publication date: 19-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-24-145-2024
Berke AMahari RPentland ALarson KCalacci D(2024)Insights from an Experiment Crowdsourcing Data from Thousands of US Amazon Users: The importance of transparency, money, and data useProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36870058:CSCW2(1-48)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3687005
Kumar PZimmer MVitak J(2024)A Roadmap for Applying the Contextual Integrity Framework in Qualitative Privacy ResearchProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36537108:CSCW1(1-29)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3653710
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Accounting for Privacy in Citizen Science: Ethical Research in a Context of Openness
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Computing / technology policy

Recommendations

Dynamic changes in motivation in collaborative citizen-science projects
CSCW '12: Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work

Online citizen science projects engage volunteers in collecting, analyzing, and curating scientific data. Existing projects have demonstrated the value of using volunteers to collect data, but few projects have reached the full collaborative potential ...
Citizen engagement in an open election data initiative: a case study of Indonesian's "Kawal Pemilu"
dg.o '18: Proceedings of the 19th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research: Governance in the Data Age

Citizen engagement is key to the successful and sustainable use of Open Government Data (OGD), involving multiple activities ranging from the retrieval and conversion of raw data to OGD based applications, to the use of these applications to solve ...
Open Government Data as a Right for Effective Citizen Participation
ICEGOV '15-16: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance

Open Government Data (OGD) is where the public sector relinquishes its role as information gatekeeper and become information provider. This realigns power dynamics between the public and private sectors. Open and transparent governments are more ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CSCW '17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing

February 2017

2556 pages

ISBN:9781450343350

DOI:10.1145/2998181

General Chairs:
Charlotte P. Lee
University of Washington
,
Steve Poltrock
Retired
,
Program Chairs:
Louise Barkhuus
Stockholm University and Cornell Tech
,
Marcos Borges
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
,
Wendy Kellogg
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

Copyright © 2017 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Sponsors

SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 25 February 2017

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Funding Sources

National Science Foundation

Conference

CSCW '17

Sponsor:

SIGCHI

CSCW '17: Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing

February 25 - March 1, 2017

Oregon, Portland, USA

Acceptance Rates

CSCW '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 183 of 530 submissions, 35%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

Upcoming Conference

CSCW '25

Sponsor:
sigchi

Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing

October 18 - 22, 2025

Bergen , Norway

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

34
Total Citations
View Citations
1,402
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)206
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)30

Reflects downloads up to 24 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Piseddu TEnglund MBarquet K(2024)An assessment of potential improvements in social capital, risk awareness, and preparedness from digital technologiesNatural Hazards and Earth System Sciences10.5194/nhess-24-145-202424:1(145-161)Online publication date: 19-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-24-145-2024
Berke AMahari RPentland ALarson KCalacci D(2024)Insights from an Experiment Crowdsourcing Data from Thousands of US Amazon Users: The importance of transparency, money, and data useProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36870058:CSCW2(1-48)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3687005
Kumar PZimmer MVitak J(2024)A Roadmap for Applying the Contextual Integrity Framework in Qualitative Privacy ResearchProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36537108:CSCW1(1-29)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3653710
Franzen DMüller-Birn CWegwarth O(2024)Communicating the Privacy-Utility Trade-off: Supporting Informed Data Donation with Privacy Decision Interfaces for Differential PrivacyProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36373098:CSCW1(1-56)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3637309
Branstrator JCavaliere CDay JBricker K(2023)Civic Reporting Indicators and Biocultural Conservation: Opportunities and Challenges for Sustainable TourismSustainability10.3390/su1503182315:3(1823)Online publication date: 18-Jan-2023
https://doi.org/10.3390/su15031823
Jones LNousir AEverrett TNabil S(2023)Tangible, Public, and Miniature Creative Exchanges: What HCI and Design Researchers Can Learn From the Free Little Art Gallery MovementProceedings of the 15th Conference on Creativity and Cognition10.1145/3591196.3593433(413-428)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3591196.3593433
Karinshak ELiu SPark JHancock J(2023)Working With AI to Persuade: Examining a Large Language Model's Ability to Generate Pro-Vaccination MessagesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35795927:CSCW1(1-29)Online publication date: 16-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3579592
Chozas SNunes ASerrano HAscensão FTapia SMáguas CBranquinho C(2023)Rescuing Botany: using citizen-science and mobile apps in the classroom and beyondnpj Biodiversity10.1038/s44185-023-00011-92:1Online publication date: 1-Mar-2023
https://doi.org/10.1038/s44185-023-00011-9
Soteropoulos DMarsico T(2022)Community Science Success for Herbarium Transcription in Arkansas: Building a Network of Students and Volunteers for Notes from NatureCastanea10.2179/0008-7475.87.1.5487:1Online publication date: 1-Jun-2022
https://doi.org/10.2179/0008-7475.87.1.54
Rosén ANormark MWiberg M(2022)Noticing the Environment – A Design Ethnography of Urban FarmingNordic Human-Computer Interaction Conference10.1145/3546155.3546659(1-13)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3546155.3546659
Show More Cited By

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents