EAGER: Towards a Better Understanding of Group Privacy in Social Media Community Detection

现在，人类的大部分交流都是通过在线社交网络进行的。Twitter、Facebook和Youtube现在争夺我们的集体注意力，就像电视、广播和报纸争夺前几代人的注意力一样。但当代在线社交媒体与过去的媒体在本质上是不同的。在线交流留下了谁对谁说了什么、什么时间、什么话题的记录。新的分析工具的发展提供了使用这些记录来跟踪热门在线话题和确定对这些话题做出贡献的群体的人口统计数据的可能性，包括贡献者的地理位置，以及他们的年龄、性别和种族。更重要的是，它可以使特别小组实时地围绕主题进行合并。一方面，这些数据对计算机科学家提出了挑战，要求他们开发新的工具来跟踪这些信息。在这个领域的成功为商业、营销和政治提供了重要的实际好处。然而，与此同时，追踪这类信息的能力引发了隐私问题，无论是对个人还是对可以通过新兴技术识别的团体成员。在我们的研究中，计算机科学家将开发能够跟踪主题和群组成员的工具，通信研究人员将确定人们围绕这些信息产生的各种隐私问题，何时、为何以及后果如何。本项目中描述的研究建立在之前的趋势分析和社区提取工作的基础上，寻求在两个方面推进研究：有效识别关注热门话题的特设社区，以及基于已识别社区的个人与群体隐私理解。虽然趋势分析在计算机科学中是一个新兴的研究领域，但现有的模型只关注一个维度（例如，位置）与趋势主题的相关性。这项研究提供了一个更复杂和强大的工具，可以通过基于主题的社区识别提取有趣的和潜在有用的趋势模式，这代表了向前迈出的一步。同时，这种社区认同可能会引发社会科学中尚未研究的新型群体隐私问题，社会科学主要关注个人隐私而不是群体隐私。这种方法提供了一个独特的机会，可以显著影响个人和群体隐私关注的机制和动态的学术理解，特别是关于特设的、基于主题的群体，以及它们对社交媒体用户态度和行为的影响。如果群体层面的隐私是一种超越个人隐私的关注，那么我们期望发现，当他们认同的群体被包含在跟踪信息中时，人们会表达对群体隐私的关注，尤其是当话题是道德负载的时候，但与个人参与者是否亲自参与Twitter对话无关。这有可能为群体隐私问题的出现创造必要和充分的条件。

Much of human communication is now mediated by online social networks. Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube now compete for our collective attention in much the same way as television, radio, and newspapers did for previous generations. But contemporary online social media are qualitatively different from media of the past. Online communication leaves a record of who said what to whom, when, and on what topic. The development of new analytical tools offer the possibility to use these records to track popular on-line topics and to identify the demographics of groups contributing to these topics, including the geographic location of contributors, as well as their age, gender, and ethnicity. What is more, it is possible for ad hoc groups to coalesce around topics in real time. On the one hand, these data present a challenge for computer scientists to develop new tools that enable the tracking of these kinds of information. Success in this domain offers significant practical benefits in business, marketing, and politics. At the same time, however, the ability to track these kinds of information raise privacy concerns, both for individuals and for members of groups who can be identified by the emerging technology. In our research, computer scientists will develop tools that enable tracking of topics and group memberships, and communication researchers will identify the kinds of privacy concerns that people develop around these kinds of information, when, why, and with what consequences.The research described in this project builds on prior work on trend analysis and community extraction, seeking to advance research on two fronts: the efficient identification of ad hoc communities which focus on a popular topic, and the understanding of individual versus group privacy based on the identified communities. Although trend analysis is a burgeoning area of research in Computer Science, existing models focus on the correlation of only one dimension (e.g., location) with trending topics. This research represents a step forward by providing a more sophisticated and powerful tool that allows for the extraction of interesting and potentially useful trend patterns through Topic Based Community Identification. At the same time, this community identification may prompt new types of group privacy concerns that have not been researched in social science, which has mainly focused on individual rather than group privacy. This approach provides a unique opportunity to significantly impact scholarly understanding of the mechanisms and dynamics of individual and group privacy concern, especially with regard to ad-hoc, topic-based groups, and their effects on Social Media users' attitudes and behavior. If group-level privacy is a concern beyond individual privacy, then we expect to find that people will express group privacy concerns when a group they identify with is included in the tracking information, especially when topics are morally loaded, but independent of whether the individual participant is personally involved in the Twitter conversation. This has the potential to develop necessary and sufficient conditions for the emergence of group privacy concerns.