ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Hum. Dyn.
Sec. Digital Impacts
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fhumd.2025.1404855
This article is part of the Research TopicData-Centric Design: Data as a Human-Centred MaterialView all 4 articles
Sensitive Data Donation in Practice: Unforeseen Challenges and Lessons Learned
Provisionally accepted
- Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands
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Data donation is increasingly being used to collect personal data for scientific research. Through it, researchers directly interact with individuals and communities as they invite them to contribute to a specific research project by donating their data. This practice is facilitated by the ubiquity of products and services collecting data in people's daily lives, which means data is already available and could potentially be re-used. Additionally, it is enabled by recent directives such as the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe, which gives individuals the right to access their data. From 2020 to 2024, I investigated and applied data donation following a Research through Design process across three case studies, each focusing on different data. In this paper, I briefly introduce the case studies, reflect on my experience, and discuss the unforeseen challenges I faced and the practical considerations I learned from these. I hope these can aid researchers and practitioners in applying and further developing data donation research.
Keywords: Data donation, Personal data, Sensitive data, Privacy Zip folder, .JSON Apple: .XML Explore Data After donation. Before donation. Before donation
Received: 21 Mar 2024; Accepted: 18 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Gomez Ortega. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Alejandra Gomez Ortega, Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.