I am writing to ask peoples experiences and opinions about using platforms such as flickr, youtube, blogspot etc for doing user research, e.g having people create photo or video diaries on these platforms or participate in remote user research via blogs.
Specifically I am interested in the ethics of storing data on these kinds of spaces in terms of ownership and safety of data. In return for being free, most of these platforms do retain some rights over your data (some more than others as we have recently experienced). It has always been my concern that by using any of these spaces there is risk around not being able to guarantee the safety or privacy of this data, which is often a prerequisite to user research. (Not all research needs to be framed like this of course). I am interested in how other practitioners approach this in the context of user research. In some studies I have been involved in we have specifically used Wordpress so that we could host the data ourselves, but in other cases we have used platforms such as Facebook but made very clear in the consent forms the risk associated with posting data there. While there are numerous publications that document the use of media platforms in user research very few (that I have come across anyway) mention the ethics of selecting the platforms they use, or issues relating to storage, copyrights and safety of data. I would love to hear other peoples experiences and opinions about this. What kinds of platforms are people on this list using, and how are you justifying or rationalising this aspect of the method ? Thanks in advance Penny ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
