On 8th July 2025, the United Kingdom’s Office of Communications (Ofcom) published a comprehensive report exploring how researchers could gain better access to information from regulated online services to support online safety research. OpenMined welcomes the report’s emphasis on the role of privacy-enhancing technologies in supporting meaningful researcher access, and we’re particularly pleased to see our consultation response referenced throughout, drawing on our experiences facilitating researcher access at leading social media platforms.
Ofcom’s recommendations for supporting a researcher access regime
Ofcom’s report, which was mandated under the Online Safety Act 2023, outlines three policy options for supporting a future researcher access regime:
- Clarify existing legal rules: Providing additional guidance on what is already legally permitted for researcher access, including data donations and research-related scraping.Create new duties, enforced by a backstop regulator: Requiring services to put in place systems and processes to operationalise data access, potentially including new duties for standard researcher accreditation procedures.Enable and manage access via independent intermediary: Granting new legal powers to a trusted third party that would facilitate and manage researchers’ access to data.
The report and its recommendations have now been submitted to the UK Government for consideration. This comes at a crucial moment following the recent passing of the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, which provides the Government with the necessary legal powers to establish a comprehensive researcher access framework for online safety matters.
Operationalising researcher access through flexible, privacy-preserving APIs
The report acknowledges what many researchers have long understood: meaningful research into the societal impact of online services is consistently hampered by limited access to high-quality data about user interactions with these services. Such access is often blocked or restricted due to privacy, security, legal, and intellectual property concerns.
OpenMined’s consultation response outlines innovative technical solutions that we have developed to overcome these access challenges through flexible, privacy-preserving APIs. These solutions have been deployed to facilitate external access at major organisations including the Christchurch Call Foundation, Microsoft’s LinkedIn, Dailymotion and Reddit.
Regardless of which of Ofcom’s recommendations the Government pursues, the success of a researcher access regime will ultimately depend upon the technical infrastructure on which it is built. We believe that flexible APIs, underpinned by privacy enhancing technologies, offer the best route to align incentives between regulated service providers, researchers, and regulators. This technology already exists and has been leveraged in production environments at leading social media companies. It is now ready to be scaled – the UK government has an enormous opportunity to do this and become the first jurisdiction to get the complex challenge of researcher access right.
The future of online safety research lies not in choosing between privacy and transparency, but in using innovative technologies to achieve both. We look forward to supporting Ofcom and the UK Government as they work to establish a robust and effective researcher access regime.
Read Ofcom’s report here.
Read OpenMined’s consultation response here.
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