Public notice for Twitter and Reddit web scraping

We collect social media posts via web scraping: we use tools that automatically extract information from publicly available data on social media. From Twitter, we download the tweets containing the hashtag #darkpattern or #darkpatterns. From Reddit, we download the posts published on the subreddits https://www.reddit.com/r/darkpatterns/ and https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/. We use the information shared by social media users to build a database of examples of dark patterns and opinions about them. We use such database to analyze dark patterns and create solutions, like applications that can automatically detect dark patterns.

Specifically, we collect:

• Social media posts (like tweets and Reddit posts) about dark patterns. The posts can contain personal opinions or references to consumer habits, hobbies and interests;
• Images and screenshots of examples of dark patterns that are associated with the posts. We do not collect profile pictures;
• The name and location of the users who share the posts and imags;
• The date of publication of the posts.

If sensitive data (e.g. religious belief, political or philosophical views) is collected unwillingly, it will be erased in due delay and no later than 72 hours and will not be used in any way for the project.

• You have the right to know which information we hold about you (right of access, Art. 15 GDPR).
• You have the right to ask us to rectify the data we hold about you, if incomplete or inaccurate (right to rectification, Art. 16 GDPR).
• You can object to the processing (right to object to processing, Art. 21 GDPR), which would stop or prevent us from using your data.
• You have the right to ask us to delete your data (right to erasure, Art. 17 GDPR).
• Finally, you can ask us to limit how we use your data (right to restrict processing, Art. 18 GDPR).

If you have questions, doubts or complaints about the way we process your personal data, please contact the Data Protection Officer (dpo@uni.lu). She will engage with us to answer your questions. We will do our best to answer quickly and address your concerns.
If you consider that our processing of your personal data infringes the GDPR, you  have the right to lodge a complaint  with the relevant supervisory authority in Luxembourg, the Commission Nationale pour la Protection des Données.

1. Manual analysis carried out by the members of our research group: we intend to identify interesting use cases among the dark pattern examples that we collect. The selection happens through a manual inspection of individual tweets stored in our database.
2. Manual analysis done by the members of our MISP instance: we intend to invite a selected group of experts (academic researchers, members of consumer protection organizations and supervisory authorities) that investigate dark patterns. In 2022, we will invite them to a specific MISP instance. Members of our research group will share selected anonymized social media posts and images.
3. Automated analysis on images of dark patterns, with the goal of training algorithms. We intend to develop machine learning techniques to enable automated recognition and classification of new instances of dark patterns found on other websites or in other databases.
4. Automated textual analysis of social media posts to determine the feelings (negative, positive, neutral) shared by users about dark patterns.