[Air-l] Social Networking Web Site Permissions...

[elw at stderr.org]

>> Does anyone know of a way to prove that the information on myspace.com 
>> is public information and thus permission from the owners is not 
>> necessary?

If you can hit it with a web browser without typing in any passwords, 
surely your IRB will conclude that it is public information.

I don't think that you can get to most of the content on myspace without, 
at minimum, having an account on the system.

As a general pattern, things that require membership are not considered 
"public" by IRBs.

This likely punts you solidly out of the IRB's "exempt review" category, 
and means that you'll have to do quite a lot more work to properly do 
research that involves MySpace.

--elijah