Inspiration
Collecting personal data is integral to scientific research, but it also exposes participants to privacy risks. We aim to investigate how people's perceptions and concerns about privacy affect their participation in scientific research and how this may impact the research itself. Our goal is to gain a better understanding of how to address privacy concerns.
What it does
We analyzed how people feel about sharing data in scientific research and what concerns they may have, and then assessed how their preferences will affect or skew the results of scientific research.
How we built it
We conducted surveys with individuals from Technica and asked them about their opinions on data sharing in various situations as part of this project. In addition, we investigated people's general opinions on public forums and labeled them for trends.
Challenges we ran into
We encountered some issues with data counting in Qualtrics, as certain data didn't display correctly. To address this, we entered the data manually and created graphs. Additionally, we faced challenges when visualizing the graph due to column and row adjustments, but ultimately, we were able to resolve the issue. Another concern was the time we had to conduct this project, as there were nuances and details we wanted to include in our work. However, we learned later on how to effectively create the project in the time we were given.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We have completed all the data visualization and successfully created the final presentation we needed. We're especially proud of how many participants we were able to get to participate in our survey, considering the timing!
What we learned
We learned a lot about general collaboration with others and what it means to be a researcher. There were definitely times when we didn't all agree and had to talk things out, but that's the beauty of collaboration! In addition, we found many interesting trends in our data. For instance, people weren't as comfortable with their data being protected through differential privacy, even though it hypothetically has a mathematical guarantee to it.
What's next for Privacy in Scientific Research
We hope this research allows for future researchers to investigate general trends among people. We would be especially curious to see where things go in regards to people's perceptions of various methods of data protection, especially novel ones such as k-anonymity and differential privacy.
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