Volunteered Geographic Information
Volunteered geographic information, VGI, is an ethically fraught method of analysis. Location tracking is a feature of many apps, like Twitter, though most users opt out of location tracking if they can. In the early days of Twitter, most tweets would have associated geographic information, while today that number may be under one percent of tweets. This one percent or less then has to be narrowed down for relevant data, meaning that despite the overwhelming amount of new information created every day, a more narrow analysis may have too few data points to analyze.
In order to access Twitter data, we had to sign up for twitter developer accounts, which are subject to a user liscence that gives Twitter power over how the data is used and distributed. This includes a prohibition on sharing twitter data directly. To get around this, researchers may include a “dehydrated” list of tweet IDs, which are fair game, instead of the tweet data itself. One problem with Twitter data, and data extracted from the internet in general, is that it will degrade over time as relevant information is buried under the “firehose” of new information, and users delete their accounts and posts.