Participants in the MyPersonality Project gave express consent for their data to be shared as part of this research. However, recent articles in The Guardian suggest that the personality prediction method published by Stillwell and Kosinski may have been used in political campaigns.
The suggestion that the personality prediction method may have been used for political campaigns raises a number of ethical questions. How is consent to use these data established? – and uk rcs data in the case of there being no express consent given for a particular defined purpose, is it right to infer consent for the re-use of personal data that has been provided on a public platform? Are social media data public? And if they are, does that imply that they can be freely disseminated? Where should the line be drawn in terms of what is considered to be a public and/or private platform?
Even if the legal case was clear (and it is not), not everything legal is ethical. Researchers are bound by ethical principles above and beyond legal compliance. Foremost among these is the duty to minimise harm to research participants. Such principles are at work when leading social media researchers, such as those at the Social Data Science Lab at Cardiff, set a higher standard and seek informed consent from Tweeters when they quote identifiable individuals in their research outputs.