DEVELOPING A PRIVACY-AWARE MAP-BASED CROSS-PLATFORM SOCIAL MEDIA DASHBOARD FOR MUNICIPAL DECISION-MAKING

Abstract. Social media (SM) has become a principal information source and the vast amounts of generated data are increasingly used to inform various disciplines. Most platforms, such as Instagram, Twitter or Flickr, offer the option to tag a post with a location or a precise coordinate, which also fosters applications of data in the geospatial fields. Notwithstanding the many ways in which these data could be analyzed and applied, scandals such as Cambridge Analytica have also shown the risks to user privacy that seem inherently part of the data.

Is it possible to mitigate these risks, while maintaining the collective usability of this data for society questions? We identify urban planning as a key field for socio-spatial justice and propose an open source map-based cross-platform dashboard, fueled by geospatial SM, as a supporting tool for municipal decision-makers and citizens alike. As a core part of this tool, we implement a novel privacy-aware data structure that allows for both, a more transparent, encompassing data ground for municipalities, and a reduced data collection footprint, preventing the misuse of data or compromising user privacy.