[Air-L] Fwd: [Asis-l] Mechanical Turk is not anonymous

[jeremy hunsinger]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Matt Lease <ml at ischool.utexas.edu>
> Subject: [Asis-l] Mechanical Turk is not anonymous
> Date: March 8, 2013 7:37:22 AM EST
> To: asis-l at asis.org
> 
> This may be of interest to those in community using Amazon's Mechanical 
> Turk platform for research, as well as those more generally interested 
> in how online data can be linked in ways that can be surprising to 
> people in practice and compromise their privacy in a manner they didn't 
> expect.
> 
> Several collaborators and I have just announced discovery of a
> vulnerability on Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform, with potential
> implications for IRB governance of human subjects research using AMT at
> US universities. In particular, this vulnerability can be exploited to
> obtain personally identifying information (PII) and other private
> information of some workers, who may have shared this information online
> in a way they did not recognize could be linked to their WorkerIDs.
> 
> This may impact IRB oversight of research conducted at UT with AMT, as
> well as what research is classified as human research and subject to IRB
> governance.  I am just starting to follow up on this now with our IRB
> coordinator here at UT Austin.
> 
> The announcement of our finding is below:
> 
> Blog post: http://crowdresearch.org/blog/?p=5177
> Paper: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2228728
> 
> We are now trying to get the word out to be AMT workers, as well as 
> researchers whose might be impacted or who may have posted WorkerIDs 
> online which could be compromised via this vulnerability. We would 
> appreciate your help with this.
> 
> We are also specifically advocating *against* online posting of 
> WorkerIDs due to the risk of workers not having realized that 
> information they have shared could be linked with their worker accounts. 
> Regardless of the vulnerability, we have also found explicit requests 
> from workers to not post such uniquely identifying information.
> 
> Thanks,
> Matt
> 
> -- 
> Matt Lease
> Assistant Professor
> School of Information
> University of Texas at Austin
> Voice: (512) 471-9350 · Fax: (512) 471-3971 · Office: UTA 5.442
> http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~ml
> 
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Jeremy Hunsinger
Communication Studies
Wilfrid Laurier University
Center for Digital Discourse and Culture
Virginia Tech



Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
--Pablo Picasso