Stewardship of personal data on social networking sites

The extant Information Management literature highlights the asymmetric distribution of power between users and online platforms, while the issues related to the stewardship of personal data on such platforms remain problematic and largely unresolved. To address that lacuna, we propose a conceptual design that can help to overcome many of the challenges related to storage, analysis, and integrity associated with the stewardship of personal data on online platforms. We adopt a systemic perspective and propose a shift from the current user-platform relationship to one in which users control the level of access to their data, organisations are relieved from the burden of maintaining personal data, and the data are not decoupled from information about their provenance and context of origin. We apply our conceptual design to the context of social networking sites, where we specifically address issues related to privacy, and identity and pave the path to a broader set of possible applications. We discuss the significance and timeliness of our proposed conceptual design for the stewardship of personal data, and the importance of our findings for future research, as well as for the design of online platforms.

Automated summary

The existing literature on Information Management highlights the power imbalance between users and online platforms, with unresolved issues related to personal data stewardship. A proposed conceptual design suggests a shift towards user-controlled data access, relieving organizations from data maintenance burdens, and maintaining the connection between data and their provenance. This design is applied specifically to social networking sites, addressing privacy and identity issues while paving the way for broader applications.