OPPS needs your support. Join our research participant team here. The process takes about 5 minutes to set up. You’ll make money for installing the app, and you’ll make money each week thereafter for doing nothing other than surfing the web as you normally would. You may leave the study at any time.
Our research meets the high ethical bar expected by our universities. OPPS has approval from the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at Washington University (ID# 202312041). If you are concerned about your rights as a research participant, you can contact the Human Research Protection Office at Washington University here https://hrpo.wustl.edu/about-us/contact-us/ or by calling 314-747-6800.
The Online Privacy-Protected Synthesizer (OPPS) turns internet use into insights on the nation. OPPS helps academic researchers understand how internet use relates to opinions. It is run by professors at Washington University and Boston University. As we gather results, you can follow them here.
OPPS uses a Web browser plugin to passively observe the browsing activity of participants, and interprets that activity through the aid of novel machine learning algorithms to arrive at measures of public opinion. By combining machine learning with cryptographically secure multiparty computation (MPC), we ensure a level of privacy protection for participants that is unparalleled in the study of public opinion.
OPPS is secure and completely anonymous. Our primary goal is to understand general web browsing trends without identifying individual users. To that end, we use a state-of-the-art privacy-protection method: secure multi-party computation (MPC). You can find technical details on MPC here.
The OPPS browser plugin splits, encodes, encrypts and then sends data as pieces via a routing web server to multiple MPC computing servers that perform privacy-preserving machine learning protocols. The produced results are at the state or county level, with no ability ever to view or reconstruct the individual web browsing data. Our approach ensures your browsing data cannot be viewed, identified, sold or shared by anybody, including us.
Dino Christenson is a professor of political science at Washington University, a research fellow at the Weidenbaum Center, an affiliate in the Division of Computational & Data Science, and a scholar at the Center for the Environment. His recent work explores campaigns and elections, interest groups, and public opinion and the media environment of institutional outcomes.
Mark Crovella is a professor and former chair in the Department of Computer Science at Boston University, where he has been since 1994. His research interests center on improving the understanding, design, and performance of networks and networked computer systems, mainly through the application of data mining, statistics, and performance evaluation. He has made contributions to understanding the Internet and World Wide Web, social networks, and biological networks.
Mayank Varia is an associate professor in the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences at Boston University. He also serves as their director of undergraduate studies and the Civic Tech Hub director. His research explores the computational and social aspects of cryptography. He serves on the United States Advisory Committee on Data for Evidence Building and the United Nations Privacy-Preserving Techniques Task Team.
Instructions
1. Download the OPPS Browser Extension (Supported Browsers: Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome,
Microsoft Edge)
2. Open the application by double-clicking the dowloaded file
3. Click Install
4. Follow the prompts to install on your computer
5. Enter your Amazon Mechanical Turk ID
6. Enter your state of residence and zip code (only US residents 18
years or older)
7. Get paid via MTurk: You'll receive $3 for your first installation,
and $1 each week thereafter as long as you continue to use the
web with the OPPS browser extension
