Data Governance
Data Use Policy
Guidelines for accessing, using, and citing SFI research data
Who Can Use SFI Data
- •Academic researchers conducting studies with demonstrated ethical review and community-centered methodologies
- •Journalists and media professionals committed to protecting source anonymity and community safety
- •Policymakers and civil society organizations who prioritize community consultation over top-down interventions
- •Educators using datasets for teaching critical data practices, media theory, or data ethics
- •NOTE: We do not provide data to commercial AI platforms, surveillance companies, or actors seeking to monitor communities.
Access Levels
- •Public Access: Aggregated statistics, thematic summaries, and policy briefs available on our website
- •Registered Access: Anonymized case studies and curated dataset samples requiring account registration
- •Restricted Access: Detailed data requiring ethics review, research proposal, and institutional affiliation
- •No Access: Raw forum posts, personally identifying information, or content under community takedown requests
How to Request Access
- •Submit a data request form via hello@sfi.institute with your research proposal and institutional affiliation
- •Describe your intended use, methodology, and how you will protect community privacy
- •Provide evidence of ethics approval from your institution's review board (IRB/REC)
- •Allow 10-15 business days for review by our data governance committee
- •Sign a data use agreement specifying permitted uses and restrictions
Usage Restrictions
- •Do not attempt to re-identify anonymized individuals or communities
- •Do not use data for commercial purposes, targeted advertising, or surveillance
- •Do not publish raw posts without explicit permission and additional anonymization
- •Do not combine SFI data with other datasets in ways that could compromise privacy
- •Do not share restricted-access data with third parties without written permission
Attribution Requirements
- •Cite SFI using the standard format: "Silent Forums Initiative (2025). [Dataset Name]. King's College London. https://sfi.institute"
- •Include a data provenance statement describing how SFI collected and processed the data
- •Acknowledge that data is derived from public forums but has been ethically curated
- •Link to our methodology documentation and ethical guidelines
- •Notify us of publications using SFI data so we can track research impact
Community Opt-Out & Visibility Choice
- •Communities have the right to choose invisibility. We recognize that being excluded from our dataset may be a community's preferred outcome.
- •Platform-level choices (e.g., Mastodon instances that reject indexing) are respected by default. We do not circumvent anti-scraping protections.
- •Any forum moderator or community representative can request full exclusion at any time via hello@sfi.institute. No justification required.
- •We maintain a public registry of excluded communities (by request) to prevent future data collection attempts by other researchers.
- •Public does not equal fair game. Legal access does not imply ethical license. We treat all spaces as if consent is required, even when not legally mandated.
Data Retention & Takedown
- •We maintain version control for all datasets, allowing reproducible research while respecting removal requests
- •Communities can request content removal via our takedown process at any time—no questions asked, no justification required
- •Removed content is documented but fully deleted from active datasets to honor community agency
- •We publish quarterly transparency reports detailing takedown requests, response times, and compliance rates
- •Data is stored securely on encrypted servers with restricted access. We do not share data with third-party platforms or AI training services.
- •If our research makes a community vulnerable, we have failed. We prioritize safety over academic completeness.
Questions About Data Policy?
Contact our data governance team for clarifications or access requests
hello@sfi.instituteLast Updated: November 2025