Challenges of protecting confidentiality in social media data and their ethical import

This article discusses the challenges of pseudonymizing unstructured, noisy social media data for cybersecurity research purposes and presents an open-source package developed to pseudonymize personal and confidential information (i.e., personal names, companies, and locations) contained in such data. Its goal is to facilitate compliance with EU data protection obligations and the upholding of research ethics principles like the respect for the autonomy, privacy and dignity of research participants, the social responsibility of researchers, and scientific integrity. We discuss the limitations of the pseudonymizer package, their ethical import, and the additional security measures that should be adopted to protect the confidentiality of the data.