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, so 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.