Abstract
Data subject rights (DSRs) such as the right of access and the right to data portability can provide citizens with information about how their data are used in society. Researchers in academia and civil society alike have used such rights to investigate and improve transparency in democratic institutions. Researching with DSRs, however, is quite hard to conduct, requires some legal and technical knowledge, and suffers scalability limitations. One method to improve this is through delegation, where data subjects allow researchers to take the lead in exercising DSRs on their behalf. In this paper, we present results from a user study investigating the acceptability of delegation of DSRs. We find that 86.67% of our 55 participants are willing to delegate their DSRs, and across three hypothetical research scenarios, the most acceptable delegate is a researcher conducting studies. Our findings can guide researchers in developing platforms to improve citizen participation in digital democracy studies that employ DSRs as a data collection tool.
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Acknowledgements
This work is part of the first author’s Ph.D., supported by the University of St Andrews’ School of Computer Science Handsel Scholarship and the Nigerian Government’s Petroleum Technology Development Fund. We would like to thank our anonymous expert reviewers for their time and feedback. We would also like to thank our study participants for their participation. A shorter version of this article was presented at the HCI for Digital Democracy and Citizen Participation workshop: IFIP Working Group 13.8 on Interaction Design and International Development: https://ifipwg138.wordpress.com/proceedings-hci-for-digital-democracy-and-citizen-participation/.
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Habu, A.A., Henderson, T. (2024). Enhancing Citizen Participation Through Data Subject Right Delegation. In: Bramwell-Dicks, A., Evans, A., Winckler, M., Petrie, H., Abdelnour-Nocera, J. (eds) Design for Equality and Justice. INTERACT 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14536. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-61698-3_3
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