[Air-L] Ethics of using hacked data.

Elijah Wright elijah.wright at gmail.com
Wed Oct 7 13:49:01 PDT 2015


I think that the data is essentially the stolen property of whoever is
running Patreon.  Maybe they could have used it to monetize their site, or
reduce operating costs, or whatever.

Your hands wind up pretty ethically dirty unless you're ONLY looking at
data that could have been gathered from Patreon's public APIs/interfaces...
that's the purist look at it.

The 'gray hat' position is probably "the cat is out of the bag, not my
problem".

The "black hat" position is more of a "what can I leverage out of this
breech, and I don't care who it hurts."

I wouldn't use it, not even for secops/netsec research.

--e



On Wed, Oct 7, 2015 at 3:11 PM, Nathaniel Poor <natpoor at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello list-
>
> I recently got into a discussion with a colleague about the ethics of using
> hacked data, specifically the Patreon hacked data (see here:
>
> http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/10/gigabytes-of-user-data-from-hack-of-patreon-donations-site-dumped-online/
> ).
>
> He and I do crowdfunding work, and had wanted to look at Patreon, but as
> far as I can tell they have no easy hook into all their projects (for
> scraping), so, to me this data hack was like a gift! But he said there was
> no way we could use it. We aren't doing sentiment analysis or anything, we
> would use aggregated measures like funding levels and then report things
> like means and maybe a regression, so there would be no identifiable
> information whatsoever derived from the hacked data in any of our resulting
> work (we might go to the site and pull some quotes).
>
> I looked at the AoIR ethics guidelines (
> http://aoir.org/reports/ethics2.pdf
> ), and didn't see anything specifically about hacked data (I don't think
> "hacked" is the best word, but I don't like "stolen" either, but those are
> different discussions).
>
> One relevant line I noticed was this one:
> "If access to an online context is publicly available, do
> members/participants/authors
> perceive the context to be public?" (p. 8)
> So, the problem with the data is that it's the entire website, so some was
> private and some was public, but now it's all public and everyone knows
> it's public.
>
> To me, I agree that a lot of the data in the data-dump had been intended to
> be private -- apparently, direct messages are in there -- but we wouldn't
> use that data (it's not something we're interested in). We'd use data like
> number of funders and funding levels and then aggregate everything. I see
> that some of it was meant to be private, but given the entire site was
> hacked and exported I don't see how currently anyone could have an
> expectation of privacy any more. I'm not trying to torture the definition,
> it's just that it was private until it wasn't.
>
> I can see that some academic researchers -- at least those in computer
> security -- would be interested in this data and should be able to publish
> in peer reviewed journals about it, in an anonymized manner (probably as an
> example of "here's a data hack like what we are talking about, here's what
> hackers released").
>
> I also think that probably every script kiddie has downloaded the data, as
> has every grey and black market email list spammer, and probably every
> botnet purveyor (for passwords) and maybe even the hacking arm of the
> Chinese army and the NSA. My point here is that if we were to use the data
> in academic research we wouldn't be publicizing it to nefarious people who
> would misuse it since all of those people already have it. We could maybe
> help people who want to use crowdfunding some (hopefully!) if we have some
> results. (I guess I don't see that we would be doing any harm by using it.)
>
>
> So, what do people think? Did I miss something in the AoIR guidelines? I
> realize I don't think it's clear either way, or I wouldn't be asking, so
> probably the answers will point to this as a grey area (so why do I even
> ask, I am not sure).
>
> But I'm not looking for "You can't use it because it's hacked," because I
> don't think that explains anything. I could counter that with "It is
> publicly available found data," because it is, although I don't think
> that's the best reply either. Both lack nuance.
>
> -Nat
>
> --
> Nathaniel Poor, Ph.D.
> http://natpoor.blogspot.com
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