An architecture for ethical and privacy-sensitive social network experiments

Social Network Sites (SNSs) are used for sharing personal data and delivering personalised services to hundreds of millions of users, and thus represent an important sector of the Digital Economy. Measuring and collecting data from SNSs is crucial for research and development of new services, but the sensitive and personal nature of these data means that great care must be taken by researchers when conducting SNS studies. This paper presents a work-in-progress architecture for conducting experiments across multiple SNSs while acknowledging and preserving participant privacy. We evaluate the architecture by conducting an experiment using live SNS data, exploring willingness to share sensitive data with researchers. We also outline some outstanding challenges as we finalise the implementation of the architecture.