[Air-l] Google is watching !

Thomas Koenig T.Koenig at lboro.ac.uk
Thu May 20 14:41:18 PDT 2004


At 17:36 20/05/2004, Charles Ess wrote:

>Two important points to be made here.
>1.  It is a basic point of ethical reflection that "what _is_ the case" does
>not automatically define what _ought_ to be the case.
>People rob, rape, and commit genocide.  They are capable of doing so - and
>contemporary technology makes the last increasingly easy to do.  But these
>facts hardly justify our saying "and so we _ought_ to rob, rape, and commit
>genocide."


Has somebody advocated robbery or worse on the listserv? I don't recall 
that. People also eat, drink, and have (consensual) sex.

>     By the same token, then,

... should we outlaw eating, drinking, and making out?

Obviously not. Rape and genocide are obviously morally reprehensible acts. 
To equate these acts implicitly with treating publicly available material 
as public seems a bit far-fetched to me. I personally find it perfectly 
legitimate to conduct so-called "concealed" research, but that does not 
mean, I would advocate genocide.

>  to say that we can eliminate any realistic
>expectation of privacy through contemporary technologies, beginning with a
>Google or other search engine search, does not automatically imply that we
>ought to do so - and/or, that we are relieved of any responsibility to
>protect an increasingly illusory and threatened sense of privacy.
>     Indeed, one response to the increasing erosion of privacy is to find
>better means to defend and protect it - whether these involve improved
>technologies and/or various forms of ethical, social, and legal responses.

The private in itself is not morally superior to the public. There are 
situations, when one should demand privacy and others, when "going public" 
is the "right" approach. Democracy, for one, thrives on *public* 
deliberations, to relegate political discussions on the net to the realm of 
the private could also be seen as pretty patronizing towards "ordinary" 
citizens.

I myself cannot see, how the Internet "erodes" privacy, at least not in the 
ways it was discussed here (Google searches, "concealed" ethnography). 
Nobody is forced to publish anything on the net. What could, e.g., be a 
privacy concern is the analysis of IP logs to check on surfing behavior, 
but that was not a point in the discussion here.

>2. [...]

>In this context, any suggestion on my part that the increasing erosion of
>privacy might require us to rethink whether, and if so, how far, researchers
>and others are obliged to try to protect privacy was met with an immediate
>and emphatic insistence that privacy _must_ be protected - through stronger
>laws, including increasing sanctions, for those who violated privacy rights,
>if need be.

Nobody here on the list has advocated violating any laws, but I certainly 
would object against more restrictive laws regarding the use of www/usenet 
content and I most definitely would want not relegate the design of these 
laws from the larger citizenry to the research community.

>In my mind, this requires us to go back to the expectations of the persons
>we're dealing with as a starting point for developing our sense of ethical
>obligation.  This approach is further discussed in the AoIR guidelines, if
>anyone is interested in looking further into it.

Most people who posted on this list have probably read that document. I 
personally just happen to disagree with the "privacy-for-privacy's sake" 
bias it contains.

Thomas

-- 
thomas koenig
department of social sciences, loughborough university
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/mmethods/staff/thomas/index.html 





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