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The Indiana Daily Student

Kinsey app suspended, awaits legal review

An application created to broaden the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction research base by allowing sexual behaviors to be reported from a user’s smartphone was pulled from the market Wednesday, the same day it launched.

Kinsey Reporter, a collaborative effort between the Kinsey Institute and the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research in the School of Informatics and Computing, was removed from the market at the request of Jackie Simmons, university vice president and general counsel.

The app became available for free Wednesday morning on the Mac App Store and Google Play. It had not received prior review by the Office of the General Counsel, which serves the legal needs of the University.

Not every product associated with the University requires approval from the General Counsel, said Mark Land, associate vice president for public affairs and government relations.

Due to the app’s sensitive nature, he said, the General Counsel requested the app be removed from the market until it could be reviewed.

“We don’t have any indication there’s anything wrong with it,” Land said. He also said the legal counsel asked to review the app to ensure everything is “on solid ground” as far as privacy issues are concerned.

Filippo Menczer, director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research and the project’s technical lead, said the team is confident there won’t be many complications.

“We feel pretty comfortable with anonymity protocols,” he said.

Among other things, the app will allow users to submit information without fear of the report being traced back to them, Menczer said.

University researchers on the receiving end of the data will not know the exact location of the report, Menczer said, nor will the exact time of submission be disclosed.

“We do not store any type of identifiers (for) the person,” Menczer said.

This includes the phone number of the device from which the report was sent.

“By doing that, we cannot even tell that two reports are by the same person,” he said. “It’s impossible to know who’s submitting a certain report.”

Once Kinsey Reporter is reviewed by the counsel and re-released for consumer use, Menczer said the app will allow the Kinsey Institute to fill previously existing holes in research.

“We completely lack data from many, many, many countries,” he said.
The app will help the institute learn about issues like rape in different parts of the world.

The app could also provide insight into attitudes about birth control in areas affected by AIDS, he said.

In the meantime, the review process is just getting started, Land said, and a re-release date has not been determined.

“We’re doing everything that we can to work as quickly as possible,” Menczer said.

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