2018
DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.3233954
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Mturk Workers’ Use of Low-Cost 'Virtual Private Servers' to Circumvent Screening Methods: A Research Note

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Cited by 63 publications
(53 citation statements)
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“…In this section, we first compare our choice of IP Hub to alternative approaches, then introduce a set of tools that allow researchers to easily analyze existing datasets for fraudulent respondents and to prevent fraudulent respondents from gaining access to their surveys in the first place. Rather than directly rely on IP addresses, some researchers have instead used latitude and longitude coordinates provided by survey software to identify fraudulent respondents (Bai, 2018;Dennis et al, 2018;Ryan, 2018). Under this approach, responses coming from identical geographical coordinates are assumed to be stemming from a server farm used for VPS services.…”
Section: Detecting and Preventing Fraudulent Responsesmentioning
confidence: 99%
See 1 more Smart Citation
“…In this section, we first compare our choice of IP Hub to alternative approaches, then introduce a set of tools that allow researchers to easily analyze existing datasets for fraudulent respondents and to prevent fraudulent respondents from gaining access to their surveys in the first place. Rather than directly rely on IP addresses, some researchers have instead used latitude and longitude coordinates provided by survey software to identify fraudulent respondents (Bai, 2018;Dennis et al, 2018;Ryan, 2018). Under this approach, responses coming from identical geographical coordinates are assumed to be stemming from a server farm used for VPS services.…”
Section: Detecting and Preventing Fraudulent Responsesmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…The problem, however, was quickly traced back to international respondents who mask their location using virtual private servers (VPS; also sometimes referred to as virtual private networks or proxies), 2 in order to take surveys designed for US participants only. Many of these respondents provided substantially lower-quality responses, including nonsensical answers to open-ended questions, random answers to experimental manipulations, and suspicious responses to demographic questions (Ahler et al, 2018;Dennis et al, 2018;TurkPrime, n.d.). Although international respondents need not necessarily be less attentive than those in the USA, these findings suggest that large proportions of them were not engaging seriously with the surveys they took and their use of tactics to deceive the survey research system suggest they are less trustworthy in their survey behavior.…”
Section: Introductionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…A possibly more efficient strategy (for researchers and participants alike) is for researchers to restrict eligibility to MTurkers who are likely to be proficient in the language of the survey (e.g., American MTurkers for English language surveys). However, note that non-US MTurkers can masquerade as Americans through the use of virtual private servers (VPS; for a recent example, see Dennis, Goodson, & Pearson, 2018) though tools to prevent VPS users from entering a survey exist (TurkPrime recently implemented one).…”
Section: Solutionsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Independent of the stakes sensitivity of knowledge, there should also be an effect of switching the polarity of the prompt: If participants are willing to agree with the statement that the protagonist of a story knows that p in a particular scenario with a particular degree of stakes, participants should be less willing to agree with the state-6. Given recent concerns and emerging evidence that the integrity of MTurk-based studies has been compromised by bots or responses from individuals using Virtual Private Servers (VPS) (faking their location), screening procedures were performed by identifying identical GPS locations with unique IP addresses, determining whether IP addresses derived from an Internet Service Provider (ISP) or data center, and evaluating open-ended responses against a set of criteria (for full details regarding this procedure see Dennis, Goodson, & Pearson 2018). ment that the protagonist doesn't know that p in the same combination of scenario and degree of stakes.…”
Section: Hypothesismentioning
confidence: 99%