Footprints: Digital Data Donation Study
In developmentA government-funded study of the relationship between personality and online behaviour, using consent-gated digital data donation rather than self-report alone.
Footprints studies how personality relates to real online behaviour — not just what people report about themselves, but the digital traces of how they actually act and present themselves across different platforms. It’s funded as part of a government grant into personality and online behaviour.
Participants request their own Data Download Package from platforms like Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, or WhatsApp, then upload it to a browser-based donation task. Extraction and anonymisation run locally in the participant’s own browser — raw data never leaves their device. They then review exactly what was extracted and consent to donate a privacy-preserving subset, before completing a short survey about their media use and self-presentation. An optional email-donation component lets interested participants forward selected messages to a dedicated study inbox.
The technical approach follows the Digital Data Donation Infrastructure (D3I) standard, built on the Port/Next/Feldspar data-donation-task framework, and is entirely consent-gated and GDPR-aligned.