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

jeremy hunsinger jhuns at vt.edu
Sat May 7 08:18:04 PDT 2011


I think the tendency is to muddy the waters immensely here, but I also don't think we need to muddy the waters in regards to the Document vs Research Subject distinction.  If you were allowed to research facebook, then you could do it either way or both ways, having subjects and documents, having just documents, or having just subjects.   But once we are dealing with documents, then the only question we have is whether those are published documents or not.   

I think that instead of muddying the waters and continuing to say it is not simple, as we are inclined to do as academics, is going to continue to cause us grief and possibly prevent perfectly reasonable research, and thus i think we should embark on the other strategy that says:  'We can make this simple'.  If it is published, it is public and open to research, you determine if it is published using these guidelines.  If it is not published, then what is it, is it a private diary?  is it a private letter?  who has rights to the material and how can it be released for research.    If you are dealing with research subjects, in what way are you doing that?  if you are just reading their postings... you are not interacting with them and not creating research subjects, if you are doing an ethnography or participatory or action research then yes you are interacting with them and you are creating human subjects, in short, a matrix of methods in relation to their objects would greatly clarify the document vs subject distinction.  

In terms of public private on the web, my position is more or less that if you put it on the web and you do not protect in in some manner via legal device, technical system, or otherwise, then you are producing a public document and that's the end of it.  People  I would argue that it does not matter if that was not your intent or that you wanted it to be private, what matters is that you committed something to the public record, and while you can withdraw it, once it is distributed, you might find that very difficult, and withdrawing likely doesn't change it's public status, it just changes the ease of access to that data.   

Robots.txt should not be ignored.  it is one of the technical means that people use to secure their property on the web.  If there is a robots txt and it prevents you from making a copy of something, then i'd guess that the owners of the material do not want you to use it for research, and you'd need to get permission.




More information about the Air-L mailing list