Personal data protection and academia: GDPR issues and multi-modal data-collections "in the wild"

Abstract

The European Union (EU) General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) has a direct impact on research activities, as it raises the awareness of personal rights not only among the scientists but also among the data-subjects scientists process information from. This paper presents the dilemma related to the privacy of audio and video data, compliance with the EU GDPR, and techniques to anonymize and pseudonymize such data. We further discuss issues of “in the wild” personal data collection by focusing on multi-modal collections, mainly of audio, video via these channels. Throughout this paper we define relevant core issues and highlight two challenges of “in the wild” data collection: Internet crawling and public data collecting. In the last section, some exemplary use cases are demonstrating the raised issues, illuminating how GDPR affects the collection of publicly available data; how privacy concerns influence participant behavior, and which de-anonymization levels can be reached with what kind of data. The key point we present is that the identity of the participants is revealed in the voice or video signal, while the latter is at the same time the object of the research. One implication is that the research community has to actively disconnect the data from the personal information on the participants. Hence the importance of a process of anonymity or omission of data for research activity. This entail the development of an infrastructure for data access control to enable data sharing among researchers