Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy (“Policy”) pertains to the URL Historian Chrome extension (“extension”) provided by New York University’’s Center for Social Media and Politics (“CSMaP”, “Company,” “we,” “us,” or “our”). We are committed to protecting your personal information and research participants (“you,”your”) right to privacy.

You have been invited to take part in a research study to help researchers at CSMaP understand how our ever-shifting online environment impacts politics, policy, and democracy.

URL Historian is a Chrome extension that collects browsing data from registered research participants who agree to be part of a study. To be part of a CSMaP study, a participant first completes a survey and opts-in to sharing web browsing data through the URL Historian extension. The participant is then provided a User ID and the Survey ID associated with the study. These IDs are required to register and use the URL Historian extension. Data collected through URL Historian is anonymized and used for academic purposes only. All collected data is securely stored on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and only accessible by CSMaP researchers.

What the extension collects

Web browsing history

When the plug-in is registered and activated, it automatically begins collecting URLs visited. You can pause and resume data collection at any time through options on the extension interface. You can also block specific domains from being collected by adding the URLs of these domains to a blacklist feature within the extension.

Social Media Data

You can also opt-in to sharing data from popular social media websites. To contribute this data, you can toggle the following options: the Twitter option will collect tweet data when you visit twitter.com, the YouTube option will collect videos listed when visiting youtube.com, and the Facebook option will solely collect URLs that appear on your Facebook news feed when visiting facebook.com. This data is only collected if a you opt-in to add these sites. Each social media site is activated separately. Data will only be collected from the social media websites that you have opted-in to sharing.

Controlling what you share

Pausing data collection

You can pause data collection using the pause toggle feature on the extension. This will pause all data collection until you toggle the pause control back to active.

Removing data

You can revoke your shared data at any time. Within URL Historian, you can delete data that has been shared for up to ten days after it was collected. If more than ten days have passed since data was collected, you can contact NYU CSMaP Engineers at csmap-engineers@nyu.edu to request your data be deleted.

Participation

Participation in this study is voluntary. You may refuse to participate or withdraw at any time without penalty. To revoke your consent of any portion of a study, email csmap-surveys@nyu.edu, where your request will be handled by the appropriate teams. If there is anything about the study or your participation that is unclear or that you do not understand, or if you have questions or wish to report a research-related problem, you may contact csmap-surveys@nyu.edu.

Data storage and access

Data collected through the URL Historian Chrome plug-in will be held on an encrypted hard drive managed by CSMaP. Only approved researchers will have access to the data. CSMaP will not share or sell your data to commercial third-parties. All data collected will be anonymized and used for research purposes only.

Information that is anonymized and does not contain personal identifying information may be used in more than one research study, shared with other academic researchers, or placed in a data repository without your additional consent.

Contact

If there is anything about the study or your participation that is unclear or that you do not understand, or if you have additional questions or wish to report a research-related problem, you may contact csmap-surveys@nyu.edu.

For questions about your rights as a research participant, you may contact the University Committee on Activities Involving Human Subjects (UCAIHS), New York University, 665 Broadway, Suite 804, New York, New York, 10012, at ask.humansubjects@nyu.edu or (212) 998-4808.