I am sharing a recent paper, a working document that colleagues from the Institute where I work daily (Leibniz Institute for Social Sciences, Germany), and I wrote on a relevant and timely topic: ethical considerations when working with digital behavioral data (DBD). You can find the paper here in pdf format.
What is DBD? Digital Behavioral Data refers to the digital traces or footprints of human behavior and/or human-computer interaction that are left behind when we interact with online environments, apps, or digital platforms. In essence, it’s a comprehensive collection of user actions and interactions across digital platforms that reveals preferences, behaviors, certain communication dynamics, and patterns. These DBD can be left in various online environments such as social media, websites, apps, messengers, and digital collaboration tools. Examples include texts, images, website navigation patterns, search queries, button clicks, scroll depth, form submissions, video watch time, social media engagements, shopping cart activities, newsletter sign-ups, etc.
Thirteen years ago, I wrote this paper with a colleague Massimo Ragnedda on the phatic posts and phatic communication in online spaces, drawing from the concepts of Bronisław Malinowski and the phatic function theorized by Roman Jakobson, in the digital society context. Those phatic posts I discussed back then, which served social and communicative functions, are similar to Digital Behavioral Data (DBD) as they provide indexical information for social categorization and offer insights into sociality, social structures, status, roles, and affectivity. Now, with the evolution of digital platforms, big data, and large language models (LLMs), the emergence of DBD and growing curiosity for such research provide new insights not only for academics and scholars but also for internet companies, marketers, businesses, and beyond.
From the summary of our paper: Digital Behavioral Data (DBD) has become an invaluable resource for researchers across the social sciences, offering unprecedented insights into human behavior and social phenomena. The collection and use of such data raise significant ethical concerns that researchers must carefully navigate. This guide provides an overview of the ethical considerations in DBD research, addressing both platform-centered and user-centered approaches. It explores key ethical challenges throughout the research process, from study design and data collection to processing and analysis, publication and data sharing. It discusses critical issues, such as informed consent, data minimization, privacy or inferring user attributes. In addition to outlining key ethical issues, the guide discusses helpful resources and provides recommendations to help researchers conduct ethically sound DBD studies while maximizing the value of their research. As the landscape of DBD research continues to evolve, this guide is meant to serve as a resource for researchers, ethics committees, and policymakers seeking to balance scientific advancement with the protection of individual rights and privacy in research with DBD.
Suggested citation
Breuer, J., Stier, S., Lukito, J., Mangold, F., Wieland, M., & Radovanović, D. (2025). Overview of Ethical Considerations when Working with Digital Behavioral Data (GESIS Guides to Digital Behavioral Data, 14). Cologne: GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences. https://doi.org/10.60762/ggdbd25014.1.0