ROSE is a browser extension for researchers to capture in situ data on how users actually use online social networks.
Please see the project wiki for more detailed information. (partially outdated)
- Currently supported social network sites: facebook.com, (experimental: reddit.com)
- Capturing user interactions such as likes, unlikes, comments, sending chat messages or sharing content.
- Capturing addtional information about the content users interacting with (e.g. posts, sharer, etc.)
- Capturing user activity by mouse move distance, scroll distance, OSN tab focus time, click amount and login status
- Comment function enables study participants to comment on their own or others' actions right in the OSN
- Privacy by Design: With the ROSE control center study participants have full control over the data collected. No shared content such as chat messages or images is collected. Captured events have privacy-respecting identifiers to correlate them among study participants (if required), and to relate events and comments. ROSE's privacy-aware design aims on minimizing interferences with the field.
- Easy to adopt to changes in the structure of OSNs or even add new sites by standardized observer definitions with push update functionality
- Bilingual: English(US) and German(DE)
- Cross-browser compatibility through the Kango - Cross-browser extension framework
In the following paper we describe how we use ROSE in our empirical field studies:
Andreas Poller, Petra Ilyes, Andreas Kramm: Designing privacy-aware online social networks - A reflective socio-technical approach. CSCW โ13 Measuring Networked Social Privacy Workshop, February 23-27, 2013, San Antonio, Texas, USA.
To build ROSE you need node, npm, bower, ember-cli and gulp
installed. You can build your own copy of ROSE with the following steps
-
Install dependencies with
npm
npm install
During install you may get asked a few questions. Just choose the defaults. If progress is halted just press return once.
-
Build ROSE UI based on Ember (You can skip this step. A precompiled version is in the repository)
cd rui/ npm install bower install ember build cd ..
-
Build packages for Chrome, Firefox and Safari with Kango
gulp build
During development you can make use of watch processes:
-
Rebuild UI with watch in
rui/
ember build -w
-
Rebuild ROSE with watch and reload
gulp
ROSE is developed by:
Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology SIT
Rheinstrasse 75
64295 Darmstadt
Germany
For questions about ROSE feel free to contact Andreas Poller, [email protected]
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.