Privacy, Security and Data Protection in Crowdsourcing Platforms: Issues and Recommendations

Abstract

Following the birth of ‘digital’ crowdsourcing for crisis response, numbers of platforms have been developed by different crisis response to address crisis. At present the crisis informatics is based on crowdsourced data analytics - a combination of crowdsourcing retrieval and filtering, situational awareness and decision support systems. As emerging tools and technologies offer huge potential to response quickly and on time during crisis, crisis responders do take support from these tools and techniques. Present crisis response work is more affordable, more accurate and more trustworthy. However, researchers and crisis responders mention some risks of using emerging ICTs and crowdsourcing in disaster management. To understand and identify these risks properly, an intensive research was conducted among four crowdsourcing platforms. This paper aims to present those risks and offer recommendations for crowdsourcing disaster management platforms.