Privacy, anonymity, and big data in the social sciences

Abstract

Quality social science research and the privacy of human subjects require trust.

Digital Service Innovation Enabled by Big Data Analytics - A Review and the Way Forward

“…Privacy remains a burning issue in the age of big data due to monetization and sharing of data. Social actors, including users and citizens, are increasingly concerned about the amount of information shared about them and the compromises they need to make to use a particular service [32,77]. Thus, this research area needs to be tackled from legal, technical and social perspectives.…”

“…Since our BDA definition covers social and ethical values, privacy preservation must form an essential pillar of big data activities within service ecosystems. To date, efforts done towards privacy preservation of service users have always been met with a compromise on the quality of studies in the fields of social sciences [11] [13][32] [77].…”

Privacy Preservation in the Age of Big Data: A Survey

“…For example, researchers at MIT and Harvard drawing on their edX 12 experience showed that anonymization weakened the results of their analysis of student data. Accordingly, they suggested confidentiality policies that compel researchers with full data access to uphold the privacy of the human subjects [29].…”

Small data as a conversation starter for learning analytics

“…Ever increasing computational power may make data collection that is respecting today's privacy requirements entirely retraceable to the personal level within a few years. Attempts to make the de-identification process more robust may diminish the utility of the data (Daries et al, 2014). Again, it may not come unexpected that many, not in the least data subjects themselves, such as teachers, students, and their parents, are reluctant to the use of big data in education.…”