Balancing Open Science and Data Privacy in the Water Sciences
Abstract
Open science practices such as publishing data and code are transforming water science by enabling synthesis and enhancing reproducibility. However, as research increasingly bridges the physical and social science domains (e.g., socio-hydrology), there is the potential for well-meaning researchers to unintentionally violate the privacy and security of individuals or communities by sharing sensitive information. Here we identify the contexts in which privacy violations are most likely to occur, such as working with high-resolution spatial data (e.g., from remote sensing), consumer data (e.g., from smart meters), and/or digital trace data (e.g., from social media). We also suggest practices for identifying and addressing privacy concerns at the individual, institutional, and disciplinary levels. We strongly advocate that the water science community continue moving toward open science and socio-environmental research and that progress toward these goals be rooted in open and ethical data management.
- Authors:
-
[1];
[2];
[3];
[4];
[6];
[7];
[8];
[9];
[1];
[10];
[11];
- Univ. of Victoria, BC (Canada)
- Rochester Inst. of Technology, Rochester, NY (United States)
- Stanford Univ., CA (United States)
- Univ. of Wyoming, Laramie, WY (United States)
- Northeastern Univ., Boston, MA (United States); Indian Inst. of Technology, Gandhinagar (India)
- Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy, British Columbia Provincial Government, Victoria, BC (Canada)
- Michigan State Univ., East Lansing, MI (United States)
- Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
- Arizona State Univ., Tempe, AZ (United States)
- Auburn Univ., AL (United States)
- National Inst. of Health (NIH), Triangle Park, NC (United States)
- Univ. of Arizona, Tucson, AZ (United States)
- Publication Date:
- Research Org.:
- Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
- Sponsoring Org.:
- USDOE
- OSTI Identifier:
- 1559690
- Grant/Contract Number:
- AC05-00OR22725
- Resource Type:
- Accepted Manuscript
- Journal Name:
- Water Resources Research
- Additional Journal Information:
- Journal Volume: 55; Journal Issue: 7; Journal ID: ISSN 0043-1397
- Publisher:
- American Geophysical Union (AGU)
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
- Subject:
- 96 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND PRESERVATION
Citation Formats
Zipper, Samuel C., Stack Whitney, Kaitlin, Deines, Jillian M., Befus, Kevin M., Bhatia, Udit, Albers, Sam J., Beecher, Janice, Brelsford, Christa, Garcia, Margaret, Gleeson, Tom, O'Donnell, Frances, Resnik, David, and Schlager, Edella. Balancing Open Science and Data Privacy in the Water Sciences. United States: N. p., 2019.
Web. doi:10.1029/2019WR025080.
Zipper, Samuel C., Stack Whitney, Kaitlin, Deines, Jillian M., Befus, Kevin M., Bhatia, Udit, Albers, Sam J., Beecher, Janice, Brelsford, Christa, Garcia, Margaret, Gleeson, Tom, O'Donnell, Frances, Resnik, David, & Schlager, Edella. Balancing Open Science and Data Privacy in the Water Sciences. United States. https://doi.org/10.1029/2019WR025080
Zipper, Samuel C., Stack Whitney, Kaitlin, Deines, Jillian M., Befus, Kevin M., Bhatia, Udit, Albers, Sam J., Beecher, Janice, Brelsford, Christa, Garcia, Margaret, Gleeson, Tom, O'Donnell, Frances, Resnik, David, and Schlager, Edella. Wed .
"Balancing Open Science and Data Privacy in the Water Sciences". United States. https://doi.org/10.1029/2019WR025080. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1559690.
@article{osti_1559690,
title = {Balancing Open Science and Data Privacy in the Water Sciences},
author = {Zipper, Samuel C. and Stack Whitney, Kaitlin and Deines, Jillian M. and Befus, Kevin M. and Bhatia, Udit and Albers, Sam J. and Beecher, Janice and Brelsford, Christa and Garcia, Margaret and Gleeson, Tom and O'Donnell, Frances and Resnik, David and Schlager, Edella},
abstractNote = {Open science practices such as publishing data and code are transforming water science by enabling synthesis and enhancing reproducibility. However, as research increasingly bridges the physical and social science domains (e.g., socio-hydrology), there is the potential for well-meaning researchers to unintentionally violate the privacy and security of individuals or communities by sharing sensitive information. Here we identify the contexts in which privacy violations are most likely to occur, such as working with high-resolution spatial data (e.g., from remote sensing), consumer data (e.g., from smart meters), and/or digital trace data (e.g., from social media). We also suggest practices for identifying and addressing privacy concerns at the individual, institutional, and disciplinary levels. We strongly advocate that the water science community continue moving toward open science and socio-environmental research and that progress toward these goals be rooted in open and ethical data management.},
doi = {10.1029/2019WR025080},
journal = {Water Resources Research},
number = 7,
volume = 55,
place = {United States},
year = {Wed May 22 00:00:00 EDT 2019},
month = {Wed May 22 00:00:00 EDT 2019}
}
Free Publicly Available Full Text
Publisher's Version of Record
Other availability
Search WorldCat to find libraries that may hold this journal
Cited by: 23 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science
Web of Science
Save to My Library
You must Sign In or Create an Account in order to save documents to your library.
Works referenced in this record:
Validating city-scale surface water flood modelling using crowd-sourced data
journal, November 2016
- Yu, Dapeng; Yin, Jie; Liu, Min
- Environmental Research Letters, Vol. 11, Issue 12
Socio-hydrology: A new science of people and water: INVITED COMMENTARY
journal, January 2012
- Sivapalan, Murugesu; Savenije, Hubert H. G.; Blöschl, Günter
- Hydrological Processes, Vol. 26, Issue 8
Passive crowdsourcing of social media in environmental research: A systematic map
journal, March 2019
- Ghermandi, Andrea; Sinclair, Michael
- Global Environmental Change, Vol. 55
Don’t quote me: reverse identification of research participants in social media studies
journal, August 2018
- Ayers, John W.; Caputi, Theodore L.; Nebeker, Camille
- npj Digital Medicine, Vol. 1, Issue 1
Engaging Southwestern Tribes in Sustainable Water Resources Topics and Management
journal, August 2016
- Chief, Karletta; Meadow, Alison; Whyte, Kyle
- Water, Vol. 8, Issue 8
Protecting the Navajo people through tribal regulation of research
journal, September 2006
- Brugge, Doug; Missaghian, Mariam
- Science and Engineering Ethics, Vol. 12, Issue 3
“Digital Natives”: How Medical and Indigenous Histories Matter for Big Data
journal, September 2017
- Radin, Joanna
- Osiris, Vol. 32, Issue 1
Benefits and challenges of using smart meters for advancing residential water demand modeling and management: A review
journal, October 2015
- Cominola, A.; Giuliani, M.; Piga, D.
- Environmental Modelling & Software, Vol. 72
Drones in Geoscience Research: The Sky Is the Only Limit
journal, February 2018
- Kelleher, Christa; Scholz, Christopher; Condon, Laura
- Eos, Vol. 99
Smart meter enabled disaggregation of urban peak water demand: precursor to effective urban water planning
journal, June 2013
- Cole, Graham; Stewart, Rodney A.
- Urban Water Journal, Vol. 10, Issue 3
Data-Sharing Requires Script-Sharing: Data-Sharing Requires Script-Sharing
journal, January 2019
- Bakker, Mark
- Groundwater, Vol. 57, Issue 2
Annual Irrigation Dynamics in the U.S. Northern High Plains Derived from Landsat Satellite Data: Satellite-Derived Irrigation Dynamics
journal, September 2017
- Deines, Jillian M.; Kendall, Anthony D.; Hyndman, David W.
- Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 44, Issue 18
A manifesto for reproducible science
journal, January 2017
- Munafò, Marcus R.; Nosek, Brian A.; Bishop, Dorothy V. M.
- Nature Human Behaviour, Vol. 1, Issue 1
Wastewater-based epidemiology biomarkers: Past, present and future
journal, August 2018
- Choi, Phil M.; Tscharke, Ben J.; Donner, Erica
- TrAC Trends in Analytical Chemistry, Vol. 105
Growing into Water Conservation? Decomposing the Drivers of Reduced Water Consumption in Las Vegas, NV
journal, March 2017
- Brelsford, Christa; Abbott, Joshua K.
- Ecological Economics, Vol. 133
Practical Tips for Ethical Data Sharing
journal, January 2018
- Meyer, Michelle N.
- Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, Vol. 1, Issue 1
The future of hydrology: An evolving science for a changing world: OPINION
journal, May 2010
- Wagener, Thorsten; Sivapalan, Murugesu; Troch, Peter A.
- Water Resources Research, Vol. 46, Issue 5
Private memoirs of a smart meter
conference, January 2010
- Molina-Markham, Andrés; Shenoy, Prashant; Fu, Kevin
- Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Workshop on Embedded Sensing Systems for Energy-Efficiency in Building - BuildSys '10
Smart Meter Analytics to Pinpoint Opportunities for Reducing Household Water Use
journal, June 2016
- Cardell-Oliver, Rachel; Wang, Jin; Gigney, Helen
- Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management, Vol. 142, Issue 6
Urban overland runoff velocity measurement with consumer-grade surveillance cameras and surface structure image velocimetry
journal, October 2018
- Leitão, João P.; Peña-Haro, Salvador; Lüthi, Beat
- Journal of Hydrology, Vol. 565
Quantifying irrigation adaptation strategies in response to stakeholder-driven groundwater management in the US High Plains Aquifer
journal, April 2019
- Deines, Jillian M.; Kendall, Anthony D.; Butler, James J.
- Environmental Research Letters, Vol. 14, Issue 4
Data Management Dimensions of Social Water Science: The iUTAH Experience
journal, September 2017
- Flint, Courtney G.; Jones, Amber Spackman; Horsburgh, Jeffery S.
- JAWRA Journal of the American Water Resources Association, Vol. 53, Issue 5
Crowdsourced data for flood hydrology: Feedback from recent citizen science projects in Argentina, France and New Zealand
journal, October 2016
- Le Coz, Jérôme; Patalano, Antoine; Collins, Daniel
- Journal of Hydrology, Vol. 541
Open data: Empowering the empowered or effective data use for everyone?
journal, January 2011
- Gurstein, Michael B.
- First Monday, Vol. 16, Issue 2
PRIMA: An End-to-End Framework for Privacy at Scale
conference, April 2018
- Antonatos, Spiros; Braghin, Stefano; Holohan, Naoise
- 2018 IEEE 34th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE)
CropScape: A Web service based application for exploring and disseminating US conterminous geospatial cropland data products for decision support
journal, June 2012
- Han, Weiguo; Yang, Zhengwei; Di, Liping
- Computers and Electronics in Agriculture, Vol. 84
Toward the Geoscience Paper of the Future: Best practices for documenting and sharing research from data to software to provenance
journal, October 2016
- Gil, Yolanda; David, Cédric H.; Demir, Ibrahim
- Earth and Space Science, Vol. 3, Issue 10
Our path to better science in less time using open data science tools
journal, May 2017
- Lowndes, Julia S. Stewart; Best, Benjamin D.; Scarborough, Courtney
- Nature Ecology & Evolution, Vol. 1, Issue 6
Do Repeated Wildfires Change Homebuyers’ Demand for Homes in High-Risk Areas? A Hedonic Analysis of the Short and Long-Term Effects of Repeated Wildfires on House Prices in Southern California
journal, September 2007
- Mueller, Julie; Loomis, John; González-Cabán, Armando
- The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, Vol. 38, Issue 2
Mining Twitter to monitor invasive alien species — An analytical framework and sample information topologies
journal, January 2016
- Daume, Stefan
- Ecological Informatics, Vol. 31
Topological clustering for water distribution systems analysis
journal, July 2011
- Perelman, Lina; Ostfeld, Avi
- Environmental Modelling & Software, Vol. 26, Issue 7
Emerging Voices of Tribal Perspectives in Water Resources
journal, April 2018
- Chief, Karletta
- Journal of Contemporary Water Research & Education, Vol. 163, Issue 1
Agricultural Research Using Social Media Data
journal, January 2018
- Zipper, Samuel C.
- Agronomy Journal, Vol. 110, Issue 1
Ethical Goals of Community Consultation in Research
journal, July 2005
- Dickert, Neal; Sugarman, Jeremy
- American Journal of Public Health, Vol. 95, Issue 7
Geospatial Big Data and archaeology: Prospects and problems too great to ignore
journal, August 2017
- McCoy, Mark D.
- Journal of Archaeological Science, Vol. 84
A global assessment of Indigenous community engagement in climate research
journal, December 2018
- David-Chavez, Dominique M.; Gavin, Michael C.
- Environmental Research Letters, Vol. 13, Issue 12
Social.Water—A crowdsourcing tool for environmental data acquisition
journal, December 2012
- Fienen, Michael N.; Lowry, Christopher S.
- Computers & Geosciences, Vol. 49
Expanding the Scope and Foundation of Sociohydrology as the Science of Coupled Human‐Water Systems
journal, February 2019
- Konar, Megan; Garcia, Margaret; Sanderson, Matthew R.
- Water Resources Research, Vol. 55, Issue 2
Inside the Emerald Triangle: Modeling the Placement and Size of Cannabis Production in Humboldt County, CA USA
journal, December 2017
- Butsic, Van; Schwab, Benjamin; Baumann, Matthias
- Ecological Economics, Vol. 142
Farmer Attitudes toward Proactive Targeting of Agricultural Conservation Programs
journal, June 2013
- Arbuckle, J. Gordon
- Society & Natural Resources, Vol. 26, Issue 6
Smart Meter Privacy: A Theoretical Framework
journal, June 2013
- Sankar, Lalitha; Rajagopalan, S. R.; Mohajer, Soheil
- IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, Vol. 4, Issue 2
An Introduction to the Dataverse Network as an Infrastructure for Data Sharing
journal, November 2007
- King, Gary
- Sociological Methods & Research, Vol. 36, Issue 2
Sewage epidemiology and illicit drug research: The development of ethical research guidelines
journal, February 2014
- Prichard, Jeremy; Hall, Wayne; de Voogt, Pim
- Science of The Total Environment, Vol. 472
Consider species specialism when publishing datasets
journal, February 2019
- Lunghi, Enrico; Corti, Claudia; Manenti, Raoul
- Nature Ecology & Evolution, Vol. 3, Issue 3
How Universal Is the Relationship between Remotely Sensed Vegetation Indices and Crop Leaf Area Index? A Global Assessment
journal, July 2016
- Kang, Yanghui; Özdoğan, Mutlu; Zipper, Samuel
- Remote Sensing, Vol. 8, Issue 7
Using crowdsourced web content for informing water systems operations in snow-dominated catchments
journal, January 2016
- Giuliani, Matteo; Castelletti, Andrea; Fedorov, Roman
- Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, Vol. 20, Issue 12
Advancing Opportunistic Sensing in Hydrology: A Novel Approach to Measuring Rainfall With Ordinary Surveillance Cameras
journal, April 2019
- Jiang, Shijie; Babovic, Vladan; Zheng, Yi
- Water Resources Research, Vol. 55, Issue 4
Sociohydrological Impacts of Water Conservation Under Anthropogenic Drought in Austin, TX (USA): SOCIOHYDRO IMPACTS OF WATER CONSERVATION
journal, April 2018
- Breyer, Betsy; Zipper, Samuel C.; Qiu, Jiangxiao
- Water Resources Research, Vol. 54, Issue 4
Spatially Explicit Data: Stewardship and Ethical Challenges in Science
journal, September 2013
- Hartter, Joel; Ryan, Sadie J.; MacKenzie, Catrina A.
- PLoS Biology, Vol. 11, Issue 9
Land-use, temperature, and single-family residential water use patterns in Portland, Oregon and Phoenix, Arizona
journal, November 2012
- Breyer, Betsy; Chang, Heejun; Parandvash, G. Hossein
- Applied Geography, Vol. 35, Issue 1-2
Explicit modeling of abiotic and landscape factors reveals precipitation and forests associated with aphid abundance
journal, November 2016
- Stack Whitney, Kaitlin; Meehan, Timothy D.; Kucharik, Christopher J.
- Ecological Applications, Vol. 26, Issue 8
Smart metering: enabler for rapid and effective post meter leakage identification and water loss management
journal, September 2013
- Britton, Tracy C.; Stewart, Rodney A.; O'Halloran, Kelvin R.
- Journal of Cleaner Production, Vol. 54
Satellite detection of cover crops and their effects on crop yield in the Midwestern United States
journal, June 2018
- Seifert, Christopher A.; Azzari, George; Lobell, David B.
- Environmental Research Letters, Vol. 13, Issue 6
The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship
journal, March 2016
- Wilkinson, Mark D.; Dumontier, Michel; Aalbersberg, IJsbrand Jan
- Scientific Data, Vol. 3, Issue 1
YouTube as a crowd-generated water level archive
journal, October 2016
- Michelsen, N.; Dirks, H.; Schulz, S.
- Science of The Total Environment, Vol. 568
Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks
journal, October 1999
- Barabási, Albert-László; Albert, Réka
- Science, Vol. 286, Issue 5439
Socio-environmental drought response in a mixed urban-agricultural setting: synthesizing biophysical and governance responses in the Platte River Watershed, Nebraska, USA
journal, January 2017
- Zipper, Samuel C.; Helm Smith, Kelly; Breyer, Betsy
- Ecology and Society, Vol. 22, Issue 4
Untangling the effects of shallow groundwater and soil texture as drivers of subfield-scale yield variability: YIELD, GROUNDWATER, SOIL
journal, August 2015
- Zipper, Samuel C.; Soylu, Mehmet Evren; Booth, Eric G.
- Water Resources Research, Vol. 51, Issue 8
Impacts of Surface Water Diversions for Marijuana Cultivation on Aquatic Habitat in Four Northwestern California Watersheds
journal, March 2015
- Bauer, Scott; Olson, Jennifer; Cockrill, Adam
- PLOS ONE, Vol. 10, Issue 3
An analysis of ethical issues in using wastewater analysis to monitor illicit drug use: Ethical issues in wastewater monitoring for drug use
journal, May 2012
- Hall, Wayne; Prichard, Jeremy; Kirkbride, Paul
- Addiction, Vol. 107, Issue 10
The emergence of cannabis agriculture frontiers as environmental threats
journal, December 2018
- Butsic, Van; Carah, Jennifer K.; Baumann, Matthias
- Environmental Research Letters, Vol. 13, Issue 12
Public access to spatial data on private-land conservation
journal, January 2017
- Rissman, Adena R.; Owley, Jessica; L'Roe, Andrew W.
- Ecology and Society, Vol. 22, Issue 2
Tracing the Spatial-Temporal Evolution of Events Based on Social Media Data
journal, March 2017
- Zhou, Xiaolu; Xu, Chen
- ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, Vol. 6, Issue 3
Publication reform to safeguard wildlife from researcher harm
journal, April 2019
- Field, Kate A.; Paquet, Paul C.; Artelle, Kyle
- PLOS Biology, Vol. 17, Issue 4
Assessing data availability and research reproducibility in hydrology and water resources
journal, February 2019
- Stagge, James H.; Rosenberg, David E.; Abdallah, Adel M.
- Scientific Data, Vol. 6, Issue 1
A decision tree for assessing the risks and benefits of publishing biodiversity data
journal, July 2018
- Tulloch, Ayesha I. T.; Auerbach, Nancy; Avery-Gomm, Stephanie
- Nature Ecology & Evolution, Vol. 2, Issue 8
Smart meter data: Balancing consumer privacy concerns with legitimate applications
journal, February 2012
- McKenna, Eoghan; Richardson, Ian; Thomson, Murray
- Energy Policy, Vol. 41
Openness in Political Science: Data Access and Research Transparency
journal, December 2013
- Lupia, Arthur; Elman, Colin
- PS: Political Science & Politics, Vol. 47, Issue 01
Open science, reproducibility, and transparency in ecology
journal, November 2018
- Powers, Stephen M.; Hampton, Stephanie E.
- Ecological Applications, Vol. 29, Issue 1
“Participant” Perceptions of Twitter Research Ethics
journal, January 2018
- Fiesler, Casey; Proferes, Nicholas
- Social Media + Society, Vol. 4, Issue 1
CrowdHydrology: Crowdsourcing Hydrologic Data and Engaging Citizen Scientists
journal, June 2012
- Lowry, Christopher S.; Fienen, Michael N.
- Ground Water, Vol. 51, Issue 1
Changes in implicit flood risk premiums: Empirical evidence from the housing market
journal, May 2013
- Bin, Okmyung; Landry, Craig E.
- Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Vol. 65, Issue 3
How to capture developmental brain dynamics: gaps and solutions
journal, May 2021
- van Atteveldt, Nienke; Vandermosten, Maaike; Weeda, Wouter
- npj Science of Learning, Vol. 6, Issue 1
Changes in Implicit Flood Risk Premiums: Empirical Evidence from the Housing Market
journal, January 2012
- Bin, Okmyung; Landry, Craig E.
- SSRN Electronic Journal
Using crowdsourced web content for informing water systems operations in snow-dominated catchments
text, January 2016
- Giuliani, Matteo; Castelletti, Andrea; Fedorov, Roman
- ETH Zurich
The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship.
other, January 2016
- Wilkinson, Mark D.; Dumontier, Michel; Aalbersberg, IJsbrand Jan
- UNESCO/IOC
Works referencing / citing this record:
Cannabis and residential groundwater pumping impacts on streamflow and ecosystems in Northern California
journal, November 2019
- Zipper, Samuel C.; Carah, Jennifer K.; Dillis, Christopher
- Environmental Research Communications, Vol. 1, Issue 12
Satellite Remote Sensing of Precipitation and the Terrestrial Water Cycle in a Changing Climate
journal, October 2019
- Levizzani, Vincenzo; Cattani, Elsa
- Remote Sensing, Vol. 11, Issue 19