Hi everyone, We are planning to run a study where we need to match people's responses to a survey with their public activity on Twitter. Is it okay to ask for people's Twitter handles as part of an MTurk survey HIT? All analysis will be done on publicly available data and will be presented in aggregate (and anonymous) form. I am not sure if this is violating MTurk's ToS. Best. Mert
This tends to fall into a grey area of TOS where the lens of the viewer sort of has an affect on if it's a TOS violation people care about or not. There are some workers who wont consider this TOS because they don't share personal info on Twitter, some who fall in the middle and wont care if it pays well enough, and then folks who understandably see this as a huge TOS violation because their social media profiles are purely personal with name/family pics/etc up there. So at a base level it's probably a violation since a lot of folks tend to share PII on social media but one you could also likely work around if you wanted to pre-qualify people who didn't mind it/etc. Another practical issue is you'll almost certainly get a lot of people sharing profiles that aren't going to be useful to you (ie throwaways, fake accounts, public profiles, private accounts, or just not their account to begin with) but YMMV on handling that.
