This is the repository of the tool for extracting and analysing information from social media written as part of my dissertation.
Note: The access keys and tokens have been revoked and no longer work so don't bother trying.
-- Abstract --
In today’s age of instant communication and social media sharing, the amount of information being shared online by people every day is growing at an astronomical rate. This information is often public and easily accessible to people with a wide variety of intentions, from marketing research to criminals looking for easy targets. This therefore presents a problem, wherein people are sharing more and more information, without necessarily understanding the risk involved.
The literature shows that privacy is a contested concept, although certainly many researchers, experts and the general public have their own ideas about the precise nature of the right to privacy. The privacy paradox can cause problems for privacy researchers attempting to study the issue in detail. Furthermore, an increase in social media use, and fraud cases suggest this is a problem that may continue to grow for the foreseeable future.
The aim of this project was to determine whether an illustrative demonstration of the collection and visualisation of private data from a social media profile can change how people view their privacy. To achieve this a program was developed to analyse and extract information from a twitter account, and display the results to the user.
A study was conducted where participants were asked to rate how strongly they felt that their personal information could not be identified through their Twitter account. They were then asked to answer these questions again, having seen a demonstration of the program created for this project. Analysing the information gathered from these two sets of questions indicated the following results:
The use of a program to demonstrate collecting and analysing personal information from a Twitter account appears to have an effect on the privacy views of test participants, nudging their opinions further towards what they appeared to be thinking pre-demonstration.