Stewardship of personal data on social networking sites

Spyros Angelopoulos,Michael Brown,Derek Mcauley,Yasmin Merali,Richard Mortier,Dominic Price

doi:10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2020.102208

Abstract

The extant Information Management literature highlights the asymmetric distribution of power between users and online platforms, while the issues related to the stewardship of personal data on such platforms remain problematic and largely unresolved. To address that lacuna, we propose a conceptual design that can help to overcome many of the challenges related to storage, analysis, and integrity associated with the stewardship of personal data on online platforms. We adopt a systemic perspective and propose a shift from the current user-platform relationship to one in which users control the level of access to their data, organisations are relieved from the burden of maintaining personal data, and the data are not decoupled from information about their provenance and context of origin. We apply our conceptual design to the context of social networking sites, where we specifically address issues related to privacy, and identity and pave the path to a broader set of possible applications. We discuss the significance and timeliness of our proposed conceptual design for the stewardship of personal data, and the importance of our findings for future research, as well as for the design of online platforms.

Highlights

The escalation in quantity and granularity of personal data can reveal the behaviours, preferences, and personality traits of users on online platforms (Georgiadou, Angelopoulos, & Drake, 2019; Ioannou, Tussyadiah, & Lu, 2020)
Our work focuses on the issues and challenges related to personal data and proposes a conceptual design that makes use of the principles of Distributed Computing and SoC, which can resolve the challenges of integrity, storage, and analysis that relate to users’ privacy
Our conceptual design addresses the asymmetrical distribution of power between users and online platforms by shifting from a user-platform relationship to one in which access to personal data is controlled by the user

Summary

Introduction

The escalation in quantity and granularity of personal data can reveal the behaviours, preferences, and personality traits of users on online platforms (Georgiadou, Angelopoulos, & Drake, 2019; Ioannou, Tussyadiah, & Lu, 2020). The ability to manage and leverage personal data is a critical determinant of competitive advantage (Liu, Soroka, Han, Jian, & Tang, 2019), and this imperative has spawned business models associated with data trading (Perera et al, 2017), and the possibility for payments in exchange for personal data (Lu, Ou, & Angelopoulos, 2018). Such opportunities entail addressing integrity, and security issues and bring to the fore issues related to the breach of privacy, the transparency of purpose for which personal data is collected, and the use to which it is put (Ghasemaghaei, 2020). In terms of the premises of the newly emerged field of Human-Data Interactions (e.g. Mortier et al, 2016; Perera et al, 2017), such models lack legibility, agency, and negotiability, since the users:

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Conclusion