Fair Game? User Evaluations of Social Media Data Mining

Abstract

Kennedy considers social media users’ perspectives on data mining and reflects on how they contribute to addressing the question of what should concern us about ordinary social media data mining. She reviews studies by other researchers and reports on focus group research which found diverse attitudes to social media data mining. These relate to a range of factors: differing attitudes to whether social media content is public or private and to the need for consent and transparency; the type of data gathered and from whom; the purpose for which social media data is mined. Across this diversity, a common concern about the fairness of social media data mining could be seen, which Kennedy argues is a form of contextual integrity in practice (Nissenbaum, Privacy in context: Technology, policy and the integrity of social life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). Kennedy concludes by arguing that future research into data mining would benefit from further engagement with concepts like well-being, social justice and fairness, in order to consider whether a better relationship between social media data mining and social life is possible.