Meaningful informed consent? How participants experience and understand data donation

Data donation makes it possible to invite participants to request and share their data from digital platforms for research purposes. While it is a user-centric approach to digital trace data collection, little is known about how participants experience and understand the data donation process. This study therefore asked twenty participants to verbalize their thoughts and actions as they went through data donation (from Google, YouTube, Facebook, X, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn), and interviewed them about their experiences. Using a workflow that visualized participants’ own data and enabled them to inspect and delete data prior to donation, we not only identified strengths and obstacles within the data donation process from a user perspective, but also gained insight into how participants make sense of data donation. Overall, we find that while participants enjoyed gaining insight into their own media behavior, their understanding of data donation was problematic. Most participants misunderstood or overlooked the option to search through and delete their data, raising questions about meaningful informed consent. Another key finding was that participants interpreted data visualizations as objective representations of their media use, even when these data were incomplete or contradicted their own ideas about their platform use. Privacy considerations were at play during platform selection, but less during the actual donation process.