Information & Ethics committee  Thank you, everyone, for taking the time to meet with us. As Brendan said, my name is Annie Pettit, and I'm the vice-president of research standards as well as the chief research officer at Conversition, a Canadian start-up specializing in social media research. Because I'm seen

Information & Ethics committee  I'm happy to speak to that question. About a year or two ago there was a prime example of that by one of the well-known market research companies, whereby they entered a walled garden or a website that had permission-based access to it. They entered that website and scraped some

Information & Ethics committee  In the case of social media research, or listening research, it is purely observational. We look and see what people are doing. Where consent comes into play is where people want to have an interaction or engage with consumers, and that is totally a separate part of market rese

Information & Ethics committee  There are additional privacy settings in Facebook. You can determine if some or all of your Facebook data is allowed to go outside of Facebook. If you check the boxes that say your data can be public, can go outside of Facebook, then that is the kind of data we could access via s

Information & Ethics committee  That's an interesting question. A lot of people assume that when they write something in social media, their whole life is present for anyone to see. Pieces are present. For example, you might sign up with a user name, you might provide an e-mail address, you might provide geo-

Information & Ethics committee  We absolutely support plain language. To some extent in the industry there is already a move towards it. There have been a few companies so far that have published their plain-language terms of service. Essentially the language is along the lines of saying “We're going to share y

Information & Ethics committee  We indeed collect that data, so what we see online we bring it in-house, so that we can measure the opinions, aggregate the opinions, and come to the research conclusion. So we do collect that data.

Information & Ethics committee  There are two kinds of passwords. There is one kind where you must enter the password before you can actually enter the website and see anything at all. It is completely blind. You don't see anybody's names, photos, user IDs, comments, nothing, until you create a password and go

Information & Ethics committee  Strictly social media research companies—there are not a lot. Certainly, under 100 are social media research. Then there are untold hundreds of other companies in the social media monitoring space. They're not members of any kind of research organization, no industry organizati

Information & Ethics committee  Thousands, millions? I do not have the exact number.

Information & Ethics committee  There are probably 100 new ones every single day.

Information & Ethics committee  Oh, for sure. There are the top 100 Facebooks, LinkedIns, and Twitters, but it goes far, far beyond that.

Information & Ethics committee  These days, as Warren was saying, kids are being raised with privacy in the digital age. From the youngest age, this is a normal everyday conversation, whereas for many of us it didn't even come about until, let's say, 10 years ago. So this is brand-new information; it's complete

Information & Ethics committee  This is already part of what the MRIA code looks at. All information must be de-personalized. This is the exact same thing we are doing within the social media space. Our ethical standards are exactly the same as they would be for survey research. Names are not published in resea

Information & Ethics committee  We do not enter sites for the purposes of engaging or communicating with people. We strictly observe—nothing more. That is what the essence of social media research is all about: listening only. There's no engagement.