Workshop Proceedings of the 18th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media

Workshop: Disrupt, Ally, Resist, Embrace (DARE) 2024: Action Items for Computational Social Scientists in a Changing World

DOI: 10.36190/2024.18

Published: 2024-06-01
Embedding Privacy in Computational Social Science and Artificial Intelligence Research
Keenan Jones, Fatima Zahrah, Jason R.C. Nurse

Privacy is a human right. It ensures that individuals are free to engage in discussions, participate in groups, and form relationships online or offline without fear of their data be ing inappropriately harvested, analyzed, or otherwise used to harm them. Preserving privacy has emerged as a critical factor in research, particularly in the computational social sci ence (CSS), artificial intelligence (AI) and data science do mains, given their reliance on individuals' data for novel insights. The increasing use of advanced computational models stands to exacerbate privacy concerns because, if inap propriately used, they can quickly infringe privacy rights and lead to adverse effects for individuals-especially vulnerable groups and society. We have already witnessed a host of privacy issues emerge with the advent of large language mod els (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, which further demonstrate the importance of embedding privacy from the start. This article contributes to the field by discussing the role of privacy and the issues that researchers working in CSS, AI, data science and related domains are likely to face. It then presents sev eral key considerations for researchers to ensure participant privacy is best preserved in their research design, data collec tion and use, analysis, and dissemination of research results.