[HacktionLab] Anonymous survey tech?

Brent thebrentc at gmail.com
Mon May 6 13:50:08 UTC 2019


Hi

So, a shout out to network23- I used it to run an anonymous survey on
digital privacy for coursework, and it worked well (
https://network23.org/theb).

There's a summary of the research on the website. The technology setup was
interesting, so there's a short write-up on that. There are complex
decisions in providing anonymity with no straightforward choices (as the
email discussions below shows). There are trade-offs in technical and
research factors, and need to consider user perceptions. I conclude
anonymity can improve credibility of responses, but does complicate
research, so should be considered whether it's justified for research
projects.

https://network23.org/theb/research-summary/
https://network23.org/theb/research-summary/#privacy-enhanced-survey

Short summary of the research:
A small survey was done around digital privacy, with a sample of
respondents from higher education. Respondents rated some GDPR provisions
and organisation privacy measures in relation to a computing scenario they
described. The results show these respondents do value such provisions, but
are critical of practice. They are concerned about  tracking and ‘linking’
across services, and want real transparency and control in relation to
personal data. The GDPR should better incorporate these provisions.

If anyone wants the fuller report, or any comments/questions, let me know.

Thanks,
Brent

On Mon, 17 Dec 2018 at 13:20, Brent <thebrentc at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi
>
> So thanks for the discussion everyone. Some good points. Add privacy as
> another thing that's hard in computing!
>
> I'll make a play for a network23 blog. There is some tradeoff against
> usability to consider, so other possible option is just hosting a survey on
> shared hosting, with informed consent about data storage.
>
> Other infos as an aside:
> I've installed limesurvey to try, it seems quite good- quite powerful,
> slightly technical, but not too bad.
> For unique respondents, limesurvey has option of giving out tokens to
> known invitees to track completions; from the software:
> "If you used an identifying token to access this survey, please rest
> assured that this token will not be stored together with your responses. It
> is managed in a separate database and will only be updated to indicate
> whether you did (or did not) complete this survey. There is no way of
> matching identification tokens with survey responses."
> I keep looking for a nice wordpress plugin to do generic forms that isn't
> a restricted freemium model and ideally saves data in nice standard
> database tables, without success. There also doesn't seem to be great
> survey plugin options. If any wordpress-heads have tips, welcome. Btw I've
> done some WP these days, so happy to try answer others' questions on list
> or off.
>
> Thanks all!
> b
>
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, 11 Dec 2018 at 12:00, Charlie Harvey <charlie at newint.org> wrote:
>
>> On 11/12/2018 11:07, Michael Rogers wrote:
>> > On 11/12/2018 10:51, Charlie Harvey wrote:
>> >> On 10/12/2018 17:47, naomi wrote:
>> ----------------------8<------------------------
>> >> Given you have to store your responses anyway, you could just use the
>> >> row id in your database to store it and rely on your database to
>> >> increment it.
>> >
>> > How does this detect multiple responses from the same person, which was
>> > the reason for suggesting storing the hashed IP address?
>>
>> Hi Michael,
>>
>> It can't do that - but that's inevitable if the system is anonymous (as
>> far as I know).
>>
>> Hashing the IP (or IP and UA) won't work for detecting duplicate
>> responses either.
>>
>> For example in a university or large workplace you're probably sharing
>> an IP address and if you're using one of their machines it'll have the
>> same useragent string. So if two people at a uni or workplace submit
>> responses you'll get the same hash and it'll be flagged as a duplicate.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Charlie Harvey
>> IT Director
>> New Internationalist
>>
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>> w: https://newint.org/
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