An assessment of privacy preservation in crowdsourcing approaches: Towards GDPR compliance

The increasing use of Social Media has transformed them into valuable tools, able to provide answers and decision support in public policy formulation. This has resulted in the emergence of new e-participation paradigms, such as crowdsourcing approaches, aiming to drive more constructive interactions between governments and citizens or experts, in order to exploit their knowledge, opinions, and ideas when tackling complex societal problems. However, the continuous exposure of the average users, without or with limited awareness of the dangers of the disclosure of sensitive data, remains a threat to the preservation of their information privacy. The upcoming EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) about the protection of personal data is especially well timed, and forces for revision of the processes followed related to the manipulation of personal data within public participation methods. Towards this direction, a thorough examination of three advanced methods of crowdsourcing in public policy-making processes is conducted in the current paper, analysing the data collection and processing methods they encompass. Then, an assessment of their compliance with fundamental privacy requirements is presented. The research contributes to the identification of challenges that crowdsourcing, and in general, e-participation approaches impose with regard to privacy protection. Further research directions include the implementation of techniques that can satisfy the identified requirements.