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Ethical Guidelines

Disclaimer The following does not constitute legal advice. Always consult your institutional legal office or ethics board.

Copyright & Text-and-Data Mining (EU)

Legal basis Key points for researchers
EU Directive 2019/790 Art. 3 Permits text-and-data mining (TDM) of lawfully accessible content for non-commercial scientific research.
Germany ยง 60d UrhG Allows non-profit researchers to conduct TDM under defined conditions.

Practical Implications for Tidal Tales

  • Collects Instagram Stories during normal website use (via Firefox plugin).
  • Stores media locally on the file system, giving researchers full control over the collected data.
  • Implements a minimally invasive scraping approach that mimics normal user behavior.

As a user, you are responsible for the following:

  • Ensuring compliance with local copyright laws and institutional ethics requirements.
  • Obtaining informed consent when collecting data from private profiles.
  • Pseudonymizing or anonymizing usernames before sharing data, unless working exclusively with public figures.
  • Sharing only derived data (e.g., annotations, metadata, embeddings), not raw media files.