#MRX MRA IMRO SMR Guidelines #9: Legal Issues

January 18, 2011 | Comments Off

MRA recently released version 1 of the MRA/IMRO Guide to the Top 16 Social Media Research Questions, a tool to help newcomers and vendors communicate with each other about this new datasource and method. Conversition was a key contributor to this document which is now available on the MRA website.
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This blog is #9 in a series of 16, each one addressing Conversition’s viewpoint on one of the items in the guidelines. We welcome your questions and comments, and look forward to further discussions on this exciting new trend in the market research industry.

kconnors from morguefile

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What are the controversies and legal issues regarding the rights of the people whose data is being used?

This topic is, excuse the formal language, ginormous. As researchers, marketers, and technology providers, people using social media data are still learning about the rights of people who create that data.

Some people feel that because the internet is a public space, anyone can go online and gather data from anywhere, from anyone, for any purpose, even if it takes a couple of minutes to generate a password to access the data. Some people take another extreme and feel that no data should be collected without the explicit permission of the person who has created the data.

The Conversition position falls in the middle.

We believe that password protection signals a desire for privacy. Even if it is possible to create a password and enter a site within a minute, data should not be gathered from the site.

We believe that social media data should not be shared verbatim in research reports. Verbatim comments are easily searchable online and individuals can be quickly and easily identified. Comments which may seem benign to us may be embarrassing or damaging to the person who wrote them, a person who may not have understood which types of data on the internet are and are not public.

We believe that people creating information on the internet should not be engaged with for research purposes until after they have specifically given permission to continue the contact for that purpose.

We believe that the rights of the individual come ahead of the desires of the researcher. Just as surveys and focus groups are created with the safety of the individual in mind, and this means writing non-threatening surveys and finding physically safe focus group locations, so should social media research processes ensure that the safety of the individual comes first.

The legalities of social media data collection and use still need to be determined and they will vary on a country by country basis. But, while the legalities are still being determined and after they are determined, we plan to respect the individual.

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Related links

MRA IMRO Guide #1: Advantages and Disadvantages of SMR
MRA IMRO Guide #2: Datasources of SMR
MRA IMRO Guide #3: Data Fusion and SMR
MRA IMRO Guide #4: Reliability of SMR
MRA IMRO Guide #5: Responsibilities of Social Media Data Users
MRA IMRO Guide #6: Social Media Research Skills
MRA IMRO Guide #7: Research Contributor Awareness

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