[Air-L] a question about privacy protection and copyright in Internet research

Ted Coopman ted.coopman at gmail.com
Tue May 10 18:54:18 PDT 2011


All,

I have found IRBs (writ large) are more concerned about liability than
research ethics per se. For that matter, the response of an IRB concerning a
research project will vary between institutions. There is dealing with the
IRB rules (with their legal/institutional imperatives) and then there is
maintaining a ethical center in your own research.

As a researcher I pledge to do no harm and protect participants - as a
qualitative researcher I am not to fond of the term subject - as much as I
am able.

I would like to qualify myself on the research ethics front to say I pulled
an article out or a revise and resubmit process because, as the state
security situation changed in 2001, I felt it might endanger the people I
was writing about and that there was no way I could adequately mask their
individual and, more important, collective identity. To me, that is the
level that research ethics should operate on, my judgment as a trained
professional, not what I can get by my IRB.

Moreover, the idea that you can protect a research participant from harm or
even promise anonymity with any certainty is a fiction even before
electronic databases and the internet. Now with databases and search at its
current capabilities the promise of anonymity is even more tenuous. This is
further complicated by the fact the rest of world is not operating on a
similar set of rules. That is how we get IRBs rejecting research on Usenet
data that Microsoft has gathered and is available online to anyone.

IMO it comes down to a reasonable expectation of privacy. If you are in a
public space, say protesting, such as a street or square and I want to
observe you and the crowd in that space I do not need consent because there
is no expectation of privacy. If I go up and talk to you, that is a
different matter. This I believe this is what we are talking about in
regards to places we can get to online with *no access restrictions*. Do I
still have an ethical obligation to "do no harm" and try and protect people?
Of course.

Again, IMO, interaction and the reasonable expectation of privacy are key.

My worry has always been as we cycle through these ethics conversations is
that we are constraining ourselves into irrelevancy when we worry more about
consent in these open online places and to the point where any meaningful
research is impossible. I do not think it is an exaggeration to equate a
blog, video, or Usenet conversation that anyone can see online to a book,
interview on the radio, or TV program. For the latter, and I argue the
former as well, consent is neither reasonable nor practical.

I do not think anyone here is arguing that texts do not represent or reflect
people or that we do not need to be concerned about the people attached to
these artifacts (digital or otherwise) and the potential impact of our
research on them. It seemed to me that Jeremy and others are simply stating
that texts/artifacts are not "people" in and of themselves. They are objects
not subjects. And if we decide that everything created that represents a
person is a person (digital or otherwise) we not only strangle our ability
to do beneficial and meaningful research, we reduce the value of the flesh
and blood people behind these artifacts.

-TED

On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 3:16 PM, jeremy hunsinger <jhuns at vt.edu> wrote:

>
> On May 10, 2011, at 5:52 PM, Michael Zimmer wrote:
>
> > Like Alex, I now have a better understanding the how/why you're trying to
> make this strong distinction between "documents" and "human subjects". But
> my broader concern is that some of the statements made seem to indicate that
> even if we decide a particular item under study is not a "human subject",
> then we don't need to consider any possible impact on the human connected to
> that document.
>
> there is a perfectly extensive ethics of things, but I'm not certain how
> much we really need to say... worry about a research ethics where one is
> researching say.. toasters connecting to the internet.  It isn't that there
> aren't ethical implications it is just that the questions of either Harm or
> Autonomy associated with questions of researching something are mitigated to
> an extent to make them mostly moot, but that does not mean they should not
> be 'cared' for in our judgment or reflexivity, it is just that we should not
> believe that the 1 in say 10000 possibility that this will have any harm at
> all... is really to be the center of our focus.
> >
> > To me, research ethics reaches beyond strict "human subject" distinctions
> or whether a project is strictly under the purview of an IRB.
>
> Ethics can extend all over the place according to personal preference, but
> I should think that research ethics are a bit beyond that, and then the
> question becomes, as an association, should we be promoting a minoritarian
> perspective which could in the future come back to really impinge our
> ability to do research.
> >
> > Things brings me back to my earlier concern with Jeremy's apparent
> assertion that once something is published, it is no longer private, and
> thus we needn't worry ourselves with privacy/ethical concerns.  And I'm
> reading his meaning to include cases where that publication is without the
> explicit knowledge or consent of the subject.  Please correct me if I'm
> mistaken here, Jeremy, because it then begs the question about how the
> publication of illegally obtained data would fit into your framework.
>
> as i sort of indicated, i wasn't interested so much in the legal/illegal
> bit, because i don't think it really is a central question.  Have you ever
> seen illegally obtained data?  I don't think i've ever seen it and I look.
>  I have seen unethically obtained data, and it is now in a book that is
> expected to be a best seller.
>
>
> >  If Anonymous publishes personal data from the Sony PlayStation database
> breech, can we researchers use that data without concern over subject
> privacy?
>
> I don't think you can legally contract with Anonymous that would guarantee
> anything... would you use that data?  I don't know any researcher that would
> use it if they couldn't really know they had rights to use it by its owners
>  But for instance, if Bethesda Gameworks gave you data including all
> information about users of their game, all kinds of data that was given to
> them, even if the company promised to keep the data for some purpose, and
> not distribute it, i do not think anyone would have any problem with using
> that data if it was legally contracted from that company.
>
> Is it unethical to use illegally provided data?  I think that would depend,
> I can imagine a situation where it might be viewed as heroic and
> worldchanging in an and entirely ethical way to use such data.  Have I seen
> people use that data in such a way?  no.  So am I worried about that
> problem, No.  Do i think we should be telling people what data they can use
> that might be illegally obtained?  no.  Let the lawyers do that.
>
>
> >  Are you suggesting that users took the risk that Sony might have flawed
> security, and users automatically lost any interest in the data once they
> submitted it to the 3rd party?
>
> That very well can be the case too whether the data is legally or illegally
> obtained.  Some people give up their rights to their data through a
>  contract.  We might be against the giving up those rights, but I do not
> think we are unethical if we get that data legitimately and possibly if we
> don't.    I do not think the ethics of this problem lies with the ethical
> researcher as much as it lies with the problem of information literacy and
> other issues.   This I see as one of the problems of researching myspace or
> facebook where in the U.S. many of the users do not even have the capacity
> to consent in this country, as such if you are given data or even just use
> api access to view that data... what are you doing?  isn't that unethical,
> don't you need irb approval to view the website?  I will say... no, even
> with protected classes unable to consent, viewing the data isn't a problem
> for research ethics.   The abstracted representation of data is not working
> with human subjects in a
>  nd ethical manner in this case, it is just interacting with a set of
> documents that form a website.
>
>
> Jeremy Hunsinger
> Center for Digital Discourse and Culture
> Virginia Tech
>
>
>
> Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
> --Pablo Picasso
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Ted M. Coopman Ph.D.
Lecturer
Department of Communication Studies
San Jose State University
http://www.sjsu.edu/people/ted.coopman/



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