Anything you would like to share: Evaluating a data donation application in a survey and field study

Data donation methods have shown great potential as a means to measure a person’s media consumption behavior and exposure at an unprecedented level of detail. Yet what hampers this potential is that studies often suffer from high drop-out rates, and the accuracy of the digital trace data cannot be taken for granted. To improve the potency of this method, we need to systematically investigate how different recruitment strategies and design choices affect drop-out and accuracy. We used a novel open-source data donation application, and reflect on both a survey and field study where participants were asked to donate their browsing and YouTube history data from Google. Our results confirm that drop-out is high and non-random in the survey study, but adds the positive note that a field lab settings might help alleviate primary barriers of participation. We reflect on opportunities and challenges for data donation research and tools based on log data from our application, questions to participants, and our experience of building the application and guiding users through it.