Privacy and Security

Our study uses a browser extension to help us evaluate the relationship between social media use and corresponding attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. The study involves some intake survey questions, followed by installing a browser extension that collects some of the content displayed to you on X, Reddit, and Facebook, and may sometimes modify the content on those pages. The extension will also record the amount of time you spend on other sites. The extension never collects anything related to your private messages.

Your privacy and confidentiality of your responses are of paramount importance both to us and to our universities. Our database is encrypted, so that nobody can read the data even in the very unlikely event of a database breach. Identifiable information, including your email address and user names, will never be shared outside of the research team and will be destroyed after the study concludes. De-identified information from this study may be used for future research studies.

Study ethics review number 2024-03-17285. Please contact us at socialmedialab@berkeley.edu if you have any questions or concerns.