[Air-l] Google is watching !

Maximilian Forte mcforte at kacike.org
Sat May 22 07:52:07 PDT 2004


Good points Rowin,

I too thought that the primary ethical issue concerning the treatment of
postings in publicly available postings was copyright. The notion of privacy
in this case not only seems counterintuitive, it is entirely redundant. You
simply cannot, as a researcher, protect the privacy of something that is
already public.

Secondly, it does not matter if Internet users are not savvy. The point is
that nothing the researcher does should cause greater harm to persons than
they may already be doing to themselves.

Thirdly, consent is not an issue since the researcher did not actually
solicit the information--the information was already there, in full public
view. Moreover, for privacy to have been compromised means that there must
have been an intrusion by a researcher. There is no intrusion involved in
examining publicly available postings.

I agree with a previous posting that suggested there is a "privacy for
privacy's sake" undercurrent in a lot of the messages being posted to this
list. At this rate, we'll soon be talking about how "unethical" it is to
cite electronic documents.

[Now, if you were to ask me if it's good field research practice to *not*
allow someone to revise or restate their position, I would say no. If there
were a way of allowing authors of public postings to have this chance, that
might be the basis for a valuable conversation, perhaps much more
instructive than the original posting...and then we would be back into
conventional ethical guidelines as this person would be transformed into an
informant, or at least a respondent.]

Cheers Rowin,

Max.

Dr Maximilian C. Forte
Assistant Professor in Anthropology
Department of Anthropology and Sociology
University College of Cape Breton
P.O. Box 5300, Sydney, NS, Canada, B1P 6L2
Tel: 902-563-1947
Fax: 902-563-1247
E-mail: max_forte at uccb.ca
Website: http://faculty.uccb.ns.ca/mforte/






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