Senior Full Stack Developer

The Smart Data Donation Service

Since the birth of the internet in the early 1980s, our lives have become increasingly digitised. Many important questions about what makes us happy, healthy, and human are now about what we experience in digital spaces rather than physical ones. These questions range from the nature and impacts of technological addictions, to the effects of echo chambers and algorithmic biases, to the consequences of online engagement on cognition, health, and attitudes amongst young people.

Unfortunately, understanding how things like social media, smartphones, and other digital technologies shape our wellbeing is severely constrained by a simple problem: almost all high‑quality behavioural data sit inside the servers of platform providers and multinational corporations, beyond the reach of independent researchers. This creates a data asymmetry in which those with the greatest access to real‑world data also face strong commercial conflicts of in...