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Dona

Campus der Universität Bielefeld — © Universität Bielefeld

Dona

Dona is an online platform for secure donation of anonymized messaging data to research. The donation process goes as follows:

The participants request their messaging data from WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and/or iMessages as downloadable files.
On the Dona webpage, these files are uploaded to be anonymized: only anonymized IDs, timestamps and message lengths are stored. No message content ever leaves the device of the participants!
Participants receive visual feedback on their messaging behavior to get insights into their own data as a reward.

This tool can be combined with psychological questionnaires to study associations of certain messaging behaviors with psychological characteristics. Dona provides an innovative and unobtrusive way to assess a person’s social interactions in the digital space.

Responsible Researchers:	Olya Hakobyan, Florian Martin & Hanna Drimalla
Contact:	ohakobyan@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de
License:	GPL 3.0. If you have any questions, please contact Olya Hakobyan.
Open Source Repository:	https://github.com/mbp-lab/dona-V2
Online Demo:	https://demov2.dona.tf.uni-bielefeld.de/
Ongoing Studies:	https://landing.dona.tf.uni-bielefeld.de/
Datasets:	tba
Papers:	Hakobyan, O., & Drimalla, H. (2025). Know thyself through data: Improving whatsapp interaction awareness with data-driven visualizations. Computers in Human Behavior, 108867. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2025.108867 Hakobyan, O., Hillmann, P. - J., Martin, F., Böttinger, E., & Drimalla, H. (2025). Development and evaluation of Dona, a privacy-preserving donation platform for messaging data from WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram. Behavior Research Methods , 57(3), 94. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-024-02593-z
Acknowledgements:	The first instance of the platform was developed by Data4Life in cooperation with HPI. We thank Paul Julius-Hillmann for developing the feedback plots.