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

[Porter, James E. Dr.]

>> You may see the line as clear -- at the moment -- but the line often moves.

The line most certainly moves, as Michael Zimmer's Facebook example makes
clear. His case shows how expectations, laws, regulations, and practices can
change over time. But even aside from changes over time, the term "public"
has many meanings and understandings. In a 2006 article, Pamela Samuelson
identified 13 different meanings for "public domain" just in US copyright
law -- and while "public domain" is by no means the same as "public," her
point applies to public as well. [Samuelson, Pamela. (2006). Enriching
discourse on public domains. Duke Law Journal, 55, 101-169.] And we're not
even beginning to talk about differing notions of "public" across cultural
and international boundaries.

Heidi McKee and I have talked about this issue at some length in our book,
The Ethics of Internet Research (Peter Lang, 2009; forward by Charles Ess).
What we said about the public-private distinction was this (to quote at
length):

>> What we see is an emergent consensus among researchers that the
public-private distinction should not be regarded so much as a binary with two
unambiguously clear meanings at either end, but rather as an interrelated
continuum (Bruckman, 2002a; Bruckman, 2002b). As Susan Gal (2002) argued,
³Œpublic¹ and Œprivate¹ are not particular places, domains, spheres of activity,
or even types of interaction [. . .] they are also, and equally importantly,
indexical signs that are always relative: dependent for part of their
referential meaning on the interactional context in which they are used." The
distinctions of public-private are fractal because ³the distinction between
public and private can be reproduced repeatedly by projecting it onto narrower
contexts or broader ones.² Gal cites as one example the ³privacy² of the house:
Within the public space of a city or street, a house is private. But within the
house, there are ³public spaces² (the living room) and ³private spaces² (the
bedroom, the bathroom), and within those spaces the conventions for disclosing
information can vary on the people interacting and their degree of trust with
one another. Thus, notions of public and private are not coherent and
distinctive, but rather ³fractalized² where the distinction between the concepts
operates at different levels of granularity (Lange, 2007; Gal, 2002).<<

Of course the discussion rests on a fundamental assumption about the ethics
of research: that what human subjects *think* about that public-private
distinction should be a factor in our deliberations about whether to seek
informed consent. Most human subjects aren't taking the time to read the
56-page user TOS, and we shouldn't expect them to.

Best,
Jim Porter
 


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James E. Porter, Professor
Department of English and
Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies
Director of College Composition

Department of English
Bachelor Hall 356A
Miami University
Oxford, OH  45056
email: porterje at muohio.edu
twitter: http://twitter.com/reachjim
web: http://www.units.muohio.edu/english/People/Faculty/I_P/PorterJames.html
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