The next speakers in this session at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin are Nico Pfiffner and Sina Horner, whose focus is on TikTok data donations; they compare the Download-Upload and Portability API approaches to data donations. In the former, participants are asked to download their own data packages from the TikTok platform, and then upload them to a bespoke data donation platform. This is a complicated process and produces considerable attrition.
By contrast, the EU Digital Markets Act also requires platforms to provide a Portability API which researchers can access directly once approved by the platform gatekeepers; at this point, users can directly authenticate with the platform and allow researchers to use the API to access their download package. This is more user-friendly, but less understood by users; it may also raise privacy concerns.
This study compared users’ understandings and concerns about these two approaches, then; for two groups of TikTok users in Germany, it asked them to work through the different data donation approaches, and then to review the data they donated. They were also provided with a ‘TikTok Wrapped’-style overview of their activities on the platform.
200 participants engaged with this project, and some 57% eventually donated their data to the project; 50% of the Download-Upload and 64% of the Portability API groups managed to donate their data. The Portability API process was perceived as notably simpler than the Download-Upload process; both approaches were perceived as less complex than initially expected, though.
Portability API participants also had a slightly greater sense of being in control of their data, and indicated they were more likely to participate again in future data donation studies; they also spent less time on the data donation process than Download-Upload users.
While the statistical significance of these differences still needs to be tested, all of this shows that the Portability API approach appears to be at least as good as the Download-Upload approach, and possibly offers a useful alternative to existing approaches.
