Social media preservation privacy concerns
Author: Sruthin Gaddam
Introduction
Most forms of social media are vulnerable to loss of data to due obsolescence or lack of a robust business model. There is an immediate need to preserve and archive the content, as there are no legal binding documents to preserve user data. Privacy is the prominent issue archivists need to address when dealing with social media archiving — an extension to web archiving. Having a robust curation policy and identifying the intended user community or “Designated Community” (referred in OAIS model ) or “Community watch” (referred in DCC model) is a crucial task when selecting sensitive data. Practices employed in preserving health or financial data such as maintaining integrity , having robust and secure architecture to avoid data breaches, identifying illegitimate access, creating a controlled environment for data usage, etc. can be adopted when preserving user created social media content. The materials selected mainly include practices employed by archivists while preserving sensitive data can be found on the Digital Preservation Coalition website. Some of the subject headings used to find relevant research materials include “social media”, “preservation”, “privacy”, “Access control”, “Collection and preservation—Law and legislation”, etc. This bibliography focuses on challenges that arise during social media preservation, however it does not cover best practices or challenges for web archiving, assessing individual social media platforms and their data sharing policies.
Annotations
(2013). Best practices for the capture of social media records. National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/files/records-mgmt/resources/socialmediacapture.pdf
National Archives and Records Administration discusses the types of social media used by Federal agencies as a part of their outreach and engagement activities. Several social media platforms used include Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube are used to gain a large base of followers. The research paper then delves into the best practices for capturing content created on social media. National Archives succeeds in providing the dichotomy between tools available are aimed at backing up the content and tools suitable for capturing content for record keeping or archival purposes. This is a distinction that I often struggle with and the article was very helpful in making things clear. They provide a list of tools and their description, which helps to identify the purpose of the tool which can be either used for backup or content capture/curation . They emphasize on having robust policies in place to ensure the privacy of the users and establishing a social media preservation working group which is a collation of social media managers, information technologies staff, privacy and information security staff to create policies around identifying and capturing social media content.
Blanford, R., Celaya, I., Kasianovitz, K., & Small, H. (2012). What your tweets tell us about you: Identity, ownership and privacy of Twitter data. International Journal of Digital Curation, 7(1). | https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v7i1.224
Blanford, Celya, Kasianovitz, and Small introduce the conversations between librarians, academics, and archivists on how the content on social media should be collected and preserved with privacy as one of the major challenges. They discuss privacy in the context of social media curation and preservation while laying out a case study and providing recommendations to institutional repository staff who are beginning to curate social media content. They provide a detailed description on Legal and Ethical perspectives on the interpretation of the data curated from social media platforms like Twitter which will be extremely beneficial for the bibliography. They suggest that privacy concerns and risks can be mitigated by removing temporal and spatial information that are associated with the content along with attributes such as username that are directly associated with an individuals identity. Overall this paper provided in-depth analysis of conversations happening around the preservation of social media.
Chudnov, D., Littman, J., Kerchner, D., Peterson, C., Tan, Y., Trent, R., & Wrubel, L. (2016). API-based social media collecting as a form of web archiving. International Journal on Digital Libraries, 19(1), 21–38. | https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-016-0201-7
This article discusses an Application Programming Interface(API) based form of collecting data from social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. The goal for this paper is to make API based tools to curate data as the aforementioned platforms have security policies in place that reduce the amount of private information disseminated via the API, which was the most attractive premise I have found in my research on this topic. Several technical details are articulated in this paper which helps the reader understand the underlying technologies behind this process.
Fondern, E., & McCune, M. (2018).Archiving and preserving social media at the Library of Congress: Institutional and cultural challenges to build a Twitter archive. Preservation, Digital Technology & Culture (PDT&C), 47(2). https://doi.org/10.1515/pdtc-2018-0011
Researchers Fondern and McCune provided a detailed introduction to the Twitter Archive Project, an agreement between Twitter and Congress to archive and disseminate all publicly available tweets. This study emphasizes privacy and ethical concerns of the project and how it failed to address the concerns regarding privacy. The authors dive into several challenges such as technical issues, security concerns of the archives, and development of policies pertaining to the project. The paper is not shy about addressing the failures of the project in multiple instances and blatant disregard to privacy concerns; helped me understand how projects can go awry when the risks are not anticipated and contingencies are not planned.
Hamer, A. (2018). Ethics of archival practice: New considerations in the digital age. Archivaria, 85.
Hamer analyzes the shift of archiving from physical to digital materials and elaborates on several challenges such as accountability and privacy of data. The author clarifies the shift in the mindset of the archiving community from “the completeness and availability of data” to “accountability of public services and happiness of the users”. The thought process and the dilemmas faced by an archivist while making a decision to appraise the content is clearly portrayed. It is important to know that ethical questions are considered while appraising content and the author points to Society of American Archivists(SAA) and Association of Canadian Archivists (ACA) for guidance.
Hull, E., & Mannheimer, S.(2017). Sharing selves: Developing an ethical framework for curating social media data. International Journal of Digital Curation, 12(2). https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v12i2.518
Mannheimer and Hull elaborate on the ethical questions raised by researchers, repositories, and data curators on open sharing and curating social media content. They propose a STEP framework which helps guide curators through ethical inquiry when preserving social media content. The STEP framework focuses on 4 key aspects which include sensitivity of the data, transparency of the collection methods, expectation of privacy, and adherence to platform policies. They assess datasets using the STEP framework and determine the risk of exposing private information. I was very fascinated by the ease of use of this framework and curious about the evolution of the STEP framework in the future.
Marshall, C. C., & Shipman, F. M. (2012). On the institutional archiving of social media. Proceedings of the 12th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries - JCDL 12. https://doi.org/10.1145/2232817.2232819
Marshall and Shipman in their article titled On the Institution of Archiving Social Media, introduces a project to archive content from Facebook that was started under the auspices of National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program (NDIIPP). The article states that erosion of personal privacy is one of the aspects of institutional archiving of social media which makes it a complex endeavor. The author emphasizes taking the context of time and space of the content for example a post or tweet at a time of notable event will be relevant in the grand scheme of things. I really like this distinction as it provides more context to the content and not revealing the identity of the individual. Surveys were conducted proving that individuals have concerns of institutional archiving of social media content. Some individuals from the survey emphasized the transparency on how the archive is going to be used and the intention of the institutions could alleviate some of the concerns.
McNealy, J. (2012). The Privacy implications of digital preservation: Social media archives and the social networks theory of privacy. www.elon.edu. http://www.elon.edu/docs/e-web/law/law_review/Issues/Elon_Law_Review_V3_No2_McNealy.pdf
McNealy in the titled Privacy Implications of Digital Preservation, article talks about digital culture and the importance of preserving artifacts in digital cultures just like they are done in offline cultures. The author delves deep into The Twitter Archive project, which was developed under the auspices of the Library of Congress. This paper seeks to analyze whether users can claim the right to publicly available online interactions. Policies relating to privacy from social media platforms like Twitter are discussed in this article. Several details on what information is archived and when the data is available for dissemination is articulated in this paper. The author discusses the Social Networks Theory of Privacy which provides a more nuanced way of conceptualizing what information should be considered private and a determination is made if the information should be preserved.
Thomson, D. S. (2014). Preserving social media: Applying principles of digital preservation to social media archiving. www.dpconline.org. https://www.dpconline.org/docs/knowledge-base/1689-preserving-social-media-applying-principles-of-dp/file
Thompson emphasizes the importance of preserving social media, which she categorizes as an extension of web archiving. With the evolution of social media on several platforms, I believe that social media has extended itself to much more than the web. She discusses several challenges involved in social media preservation which include content loss, as these platforms are not under any contractual agreement and can be taken down easily. Even though there is an immediate need to preserve this vulnerable content, she cautions us that privacy plays a key role when determining which content should be preserved and points us to the Association of Internet Researcher’s (AoIR) questionnaire which helps in identifying if the content reveals the personal information of individuals.
Veltel, A. (2018). Ethical challenges and current practices in activist social media archives. The American Archivist, 81(1). https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081-81.1.112
Velte underscores the importance of approaching the social media records of modern activism with caution and consent form the activist groups, which ensures that the data can be preserved and will not be left out of the historical narrative. Using survey and semi structured interviews with archivists who collect activist media, she tries to emphasize the ethical challenges faced by archivists when collecting such sensitive data. She emphasizes on the importance of acquiring permission and controlling the amount of access given to archives. She demonstrates the historical significance of archiving projects which correspond to the Occupy Wall Street Movement and Documenting the Ferguson project and the interest to preserve archivist media.
