I Feel Like All of This Is Already Happening Anyways?: Context Import and Young Adults’ Perspectives on Researcher Access to TikTok Data

Social computing researchers increasingly use TikTok data to understand social media’s impact on society. As legal mandates requiring social media platforms to share data with researchers go into effect, platforms, regulators, and researchers are all being asked to consider platform users’ expectations about ethical uses of their data. The framework of contextual integrity has come to dominate research into users’ concerns about research uses of their social media data. How well does contextual integrity account for users’ expectations when users may be unaware of research uses of social media data? This qualitative, exploratory study used interviews centered around a card sorting activity to help TikTok users reflect upon their understanding of data flows, their perceptions of researchers’ data use, and their expectations of TikTok research. The findings suggest something interesting for both privacy researchers and social computing researchers: young adults were surprised by research uses of TikTok data (traditionally understood as a violation of contextual integrity), but confidently referenced existing privacy-preserving practices and knowledge of data harms to assess the acceptability of researcher data use. Participants performed what we label context import, relying on their grasp of digital surveillance to reason through the social media researcher context. Researchers advising policymakers and platforms on the privacy expectations of users should be aware of the ways in which context import might impact user’s perspectives of lesser understood contexts. Findings relevant to social computing researchers include that context import informed participants’ awareness of data uses, and also enabled participants to express concerns specifically relevant to research uses of TikTok data, including the importance of cultural and political contexts, treatment of previously public content, pressures to share, and expanding concerns regarding biometric data.