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I'm a PhD student at CU-Boulder and am interested in using some data from the Stack Exchange Network to analyze how user Big 5 Personality traits influence network characteristics. The best way for me to do this would be to connect users on the Stack Exchange network to the data at mypersonality.org which already has the Big 5 personality traits of about 4 million users. That's a far larger data set than I could collect on my own at this stage in my academic career even if there is only a 0.01% overlap in users.

I've spoken with the people at MyPersonality and they are willing to work with admins or an API of Stack Exchange to help resolve the users IDs in their research to the userIDs on Stack Exchange through linking Facebook IDs. Is there a functionality to do this (mapping facebook IDs to user IDs) that already exists or do I need to contact Stack Exchange directly?

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    Are you sure this doesn't violate the Terms of Service or the Privacy Policy? I don't understand what you are going do once the id are matched? For that reason I rather have this question here in the open and answered by SE staff so we can vote on if we support this idea.
    – rene Mod
    Commented Jun 16, 2015 at 19:08

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Theoretically... you'd need to contact us directly. We have in the past produced data dumps under non-disclosure agreements to allow researchers access to stuff we don't normally expose publicly.

However... none of those have ever exposed users' personal information or login credentials and we're generally extremely reluctant to do so.

(To be more explicit, I'm pretty comfortable saying that we couldn't help in the case you described here. We love research, but when in doubt, we err on the side of more aggressively protecting user rights, even at the cost of the pursuit of knowledge.)

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  • Thank you for your response. I realize the difficulty in this request. I don't actually need the facebook IDs per-se, I would just need the stack exchange user IDs that correspond to the output of a one way hash or something. I'll contact you directly for more details.
    – James Endicott
    Commented Jun 16, 2015 at 19:35
  • What email address should I use to contact you directly for more information?
    – James Endicott
    Commented Jun 16, 2015 at 20:19
  • @JamesEndicott Use the contact form at the bottom of any page on the site.
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Commented Jun 16, 2015 at 20:19

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