Privacy and Research on YouTube and social media: a Provocation
Channel: Tanisha Jowsey
Date: 2022-03-25

Should researchers utilize social media involving images of people in private spaces as research data? What can such published material tell us about these people and their lived experiences? How much of it is performativity and conscious public identity construction?. Some of the legal and protection issues that come up for research tend not to come up for those millions of people - including children - uploading (making public) images and films to social media.
Important questions about 'digital natives' and agency are posed.

My own children feature in this provocation - ironically and strategically - to illustrate the children's privacy issues. If and when either of my children decide to withdraw their permission from this film being uploaded here I will delete all copies of the film.  This of course, raises another issue around data sovereignty on the part of the person in an image or film being at odds with researchers' motivations for maintaining access to the image/film data. If a film that is used as research data on YouTube is suddenly removed from the website what does that mean for researchers? If researchers download their own copy of the image/film so that they have a readily available copy of the 'data' then data sovereignty and privacy and protection rights of the person in the image/film cannot be maintained. This is just one of many issues that need careful consideration in terms of image/film data analysis research methodologies.