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arXiv · 2601.22472

The Third-Party Access Effect: An Overlooked Challenge in Secondary Use of Educational Real-World Data

Hibiki Ito·Chia-Yu Hsu·Hiroaki Ogata
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Abstract

Secondary use of growing real-world data (RWD) in education offers significant opportunities for research, yet privacy practices intended to enable third-party access to such RWD are rarely evaluated for their implications for downstream analyses. As a result, potential problems introduced by otherwise standard privacy practices may remain unnoticed. To address this gap, we investigate potential issues arising from common practices by assessing (1) the re-identification risk of fine-grained RWD, (2) how communicating such risks influences learners' privacy behaviour, and (3) the sensitivity of downstream analytical conclusions to resulting changes in the data. We focus on these practices because re-identification risk and stakeholder communication can jointly influence the data shared with third parties. We find that substantial re-identification risk in RWD, when communicated to stakeholders, can induce opt-outs and non-self-disclosure behaviours. Sensitivity analysis demonstrates that these behavioural changes can meaningfully alter the shared data, limiting validity of secondary-use findings. We conceptualise this phenomenon as the third-party access effect (3PAE) and discuss implications for trustworthy secondary use of educational RWD.

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Hibiki Ito, Chia-Yu Hsu, Hiroaki Ogata. 2026-01-30. The Third-Party Access Effect: An Overlooked Challenge in Secondary Use of Educational Real-World Data. https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.22472

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