Crawling Twitter data through API: A technical/legal perspective

Abstract: The popularity of the online media-driven social network relation is proven in today's digital era. The many challenges that these emergence has created include a huge growing network of social relations, and the large amount of data which is continuously been generated via the different platform of social networking sites, viz. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. These data are Personally Identifiable Information (PII) of the users which are also publicly available for some platform, and others allow with some restricted permission to download it for research purposes. The users' accessible data help in providing with better recommendation services to users, however, the PII can be used to embezzle the users and cause severe detriment to them. Hence, it is crucial to maintain the users' privacy while providing their PII accessible for various services. Therefore, it is a burning issue to come up with an approach that can help the users in getting better recommendation services without their privacy being harmed. In this paper, a framework is suggested for the same. Further, how data through Twitter API can be crawled and used has been extensively discussed. In addition to this, various security and legal perspectives regarding PII while crawling the data is highlighted. We believe the presented approach in this paper can serve as a benchmark for future research in the field of data privacy.