Privacy VS Open science - conflicting intuitions? : privacy | Reddit

"I'm a psychologist and neuroscientist, and a big open science enthusiast. However, I also have a strong sensitivity for protecting personal privacy, am following the debates on the role of privacy in the progressively more information-rich world, and am currently even involved in conducting a study on people's valuations of online privacy. When it comes to academic research, having an access to open and free sharing of data is of great importance. Public resources are spent on studying different phenomena and it would be a huge waste not to reuse the collected data in every possible sense - for example, make them publicly accessible so that other researchers can replicate the analyses, combine into bigger datasets, or use for answering new research questions. Hand in hand with the open sharing of analysis code, preregistering research hypotheses, and publishing open access, data sharing is an essential part of the move towards a more progressive, transparent, and replicable science. However, my privacy-devil on the other shoulder is getting very nervous. We're talking a huge amount of personal data here - data similar to those sold to Cambridge Analytica - that I would never in my wildest dreams share with any company or service provider. Yet I'm advocating for it in the context of academic research. I'm just noticing a conflict of these two big intuitions and am wondering I'm having double standards. I'm applauding the new European privacy protection laws, but get very annoyed when institutional boards restrict sharing the data of my research. I have a whole system in place to avoid sharing any unnecessary piece of information with providers of online services, yet I readily share my deepest thoughts about my behaviour, personality or attitudes with a random group of researchers. And on the top of that, I want to contribute to building a world that's open and transparent, but also to one where privacy is adequately protected - and I'm unsure whether these two worlds can coexist. I'm wondering what are the thoughts on this? Do you think that open science and privacy considerations are two mutually exclusive, contrasting principles?..."