News Evaluation Extension

News Evaluation Extension is a Chrome extension developed by New York University's Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP). News Evaluation Extension allows participants to share data that contributes to better understanding of how our ever-shifting online environment impacts politics and democracy. News Evaluation Extension collects browsing data from registered research participants who agree to be part of a study. When the plug-in is activated and registered, it automatically begins collecting URLs visited, the HTML content from Google Search results pages, the full page content of news articles and other web pages visited (via a live page mirror), page interaction events, and passive device performance metrics (CPU and memory usage). Data will only be transmitted to the CSMaP research server at news-eval.csmapnyuapps.org. Data collected through News Evaluation Extension is anonymized and used for academic purposes only. All collected data is securely stored on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and only accessible by CSMaP researchers. Participation in web browsing collection is completely voluntary. In addition to URL and page-content collection, the extension periodically refreshes its configuration from the CSMaP server, and may apply network filtering rules to redirect participants to a restricted page when study conditions require it. Please be aware that News Evaluation Extension collects the web browsing data of anyone using Google Chrome on the computer that News Evaluation Extension is installed on. If you share this computer with anyone, you should inform them that News Evaluation Extension is installed. For more information on how to install and configure the News Evaluation Extension, visit https://www.csmapsurveys.org/news_evaluation_study.html. For any questions on using the extension, requesting data deletion, or other technical problems, please reach out to csmap-engineers@nyu.edu. For more information about the Center for Social Media and Politics research, visit https://csmapnyu.org/.