Who are we meant to be ‘spying’ on?

At its most extreme there is a danger that ‘listening’, ‘scraping’ and ‘mining’ online have a distinct stalker-esque character about them, especially where we blur the edges of reality to the point of employing ‘para-humans’ or bots which are merely an amalgam of characteristics, behaviour patterns and viewpoints to effectively spy on people in social media situations.

But I don’t think privacy violations are likely to be our industry’s undoing, and here’s why. Any heavy user of social media almost certainly chooses how ‘public’ they want to be and indeed – here’s the rub – who they want to be.

We are all a slightly different version of ourselves on Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin. Indeed some of us consciously choose to project different personae in different contexts. We choose not to be the same character all the time and we certainly aren’t always the character who meets friends face to face.

The extent to which we bend and twist and fictionalise ourselves in what we choose to say or post, the stance and tone and amount we vernacularise our language all act to create a slightly (or considerably) alternative persona. And the evidence is that we are increasingly inclined towards flexibility with the truth and a degree of personality refurbishment in our online self-manifestations.

What we are looking at is an increasingly unreal research process, where we are surveying or interviewing (or, more likely, accruing ethnographic material by stealth) among an increasingly unreal sample of state-changed people. Who gets valid or useful findings here? What are the meanings of people’s online views? Who are they trying to impress when they post a clever follow-up comment on YouTube? Why are people apparently so much more politically active on Twitter than they could ever be in the real world?

These layers of disguise are tough enough to crack, and that’s before our analytics tools have been put to work to try to make sense of all the sarcasm or local-reference wordplay employed in so much of our online postings, opinions and comments.

This all adds to the increasing faux-ness of the online (especially social media) universe where we make friends with brands, we imagine we have loyal communities of people who like things, we fake co-creation processes from amalgamated voices and viewpoints and consider we have democratised the research process.

So whose privacy should we be concerned about? With a plethora of cooked facts, feelings, retorts and even entirely concocted identities, maybe it is the sanity rather than the morality of the research exercise we need to question.

And if our increasing incursions into consumers’ presumed private worlds causes a meltdown in goodwill towards research, if a regulatory whistle is blown about unsolicited or unpermitted access (our industry’s version of the phone-tapping scandal) maybe we’ll be saving ourselves from another fate – the accusation of being off with the fairies.

Rosie Campbell is a director of Campbell Keegan. She has been a qualitative research consultant for over 25 years, working for major FMCG companies, service industries and government departments. She focuses on communication and language.