Minding your Practices: Exposure and Anonymity in Social Network Data

This short presentation highlights ethical issues that can result from the collecton and display of social network data. The problems include exposure of individuals from whom data has not been collected and thus who could not give permission for their inclusion or exclusion in the data; revelation and exposure of individuals ’ positions in the network, positions they may not have been aware they held; and exposure of the connectivity among the group as a whole, which may reflect aspects of the group of which they were unaware, and/or that they do not want exposed. The paper draws on some cases of social network data collection by the author to highlight issues that have arisen, and means that have been used to dealing with them