Blogs as new sources of research data - what about privacy?

Last week I went to an interesting workshop at the e-Science institute in Edinburgh called ‘New Kinds of Social Data: from Blogs to Administrative data'.

The meeting was targeted at researchers in academia and government and those concerned with long time archiving and access of social data. My primary interest was in the privacy and data protection implications of using these new data resources. A talk I found particularly interesting was given by Karen McCullagh, entitled ‘Blogs archives and privacy’.

Karen is currently working on her PhD. You can find out more about her research project here. The survey on 'Bloggers Privacy Expectations and Attitudes ' is no longer live but Karen hopes to make the results of this survey available at this link shortly.

All of the presentations from the workshop are available online.