johan--/rose

Research Tool for Online Social Environments

ROSE 3.0

Synopsis

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.

Features

• Currently supported social setwork sites: facebook.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

References

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 ’13 Measuring Networked Social Privacy Workshop, February 23-27, 2013, San Antonio, Texas, USA.

[PDF]

Build

You can build your own copy of ROSE with the folowing steps:

1. 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.

2. Build custom Semantic UI for facebook overlay:

   git checkout -- semantic.json
   cd semamtic/
   gulp build
   cd ..
   

3. 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 --output-path ../app/ui/
   cd ..
   

4. Build packages for Chrome, Firefox and Safari with Kango

   gulp build
   

The Safari build currently requires to replace button.png with rose-safari-icon.png in dist/safari/rose_3.x.x.safariextension/icons.

During development you can make use of watch processes:

1. Rebuild UI with watch in rui/

   ember build -w --output-path ../app/ui/
   

2. Rebuild ROSE with watch and reload

   gulp
   

About

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]

License

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.