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Jakob Jünger edited this page Dec 25, 2020 · 10 revisions

Introduction

Facepager helps you with using application programming interfaces (APIs) for scientific research purposes. The application does not collect any data about you by itself. All requests are under your full control. No data is transferred between you and the developers of Facepager with the exception of an anonymized user token (see below).

However, when you interact with an API data is transferred between the API server and your computer, i.e. between the platform provider and you. You are responsible for complying with legal laws and the terms of services of the specific provider. Furthermore, we presume that you are committed to the ethical standards of science. See the ethics reports of the Association of Internet Researchers and the ICC/ESOMAR code of conduct for further guidance.

Authorization data

Some APIs require authorization. A common procedure for authorization is called OAuth. This authorization procedure makes sure, that the developers of the application never need your username or password. Facepager supports you with this step. For example, when you click the login button for Facebook, you can get an access token. With this access token you authorize the application to interact with Facebook in your name. The access token is stored on your computer until you delete it from the user interface. It is only used for requests you explicitly start yourself.

In the course of open authorization no data is collected or stored by the developers of Facepager with the exception of an anonymized user token (see below). But the API provider may log your requests and provide us with aggregated usage statistics. These usage statistics consist of the number of logins and requests from different countries in several time intervals. That's all.

User list

To comply with the terms of the API providers, Facepager needs to track a list of users if you use the preregistered apps. We try to extremly minimize the transfered data. After you login to Facebook, YouTube or Twitter your ID is salted, encrypted and the resulting anonymized token is transfered to our user list. The user list is hosted on Amazon Web Services (Frankfurt data center, Germany). In practice, no user data can be derived from your token but we are able to block accounts from using Facepager with the preregistered app if the providers demand this - which hopefully never will be necessary.

Download statistics

When you download Facepager from GitHub, the terms of services and the pricacy policy of GitHub apply. Furthermore, at each start of Facepager preset files are downloaded from the GitHub repository. Please notice, that GitHub collects and provides aggregated download statistics.

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