[Air-L] WeChat/Skype ethical issues

[Shulman, Stu]

Loretta,

This is one of the most interesting questions ever posed to the list. I had
to get 8 years of human subjects approvals at three different universities
at a time when the protocols for interviews, recordings, and transcripts
were were well established, though transitioning to digital, which created
issues not fully captured by the older protocols and sharing/storage
capabilities that, like microcomputers in general, upended everything.

When we began collecting social media data, it became clear over time that
the standards for the protection of social media subjects had not permeated
the offices responsible for review at the universities where our teams and
the groups we supported were working. To be blunt: when social data emerged
the personnel in the universities with the greatest role regulating its
study often (seemingly for generational reasons) knew the least about the
underlying technological, methodological, and legal affordances. As a
result, we are still seeing, years later, massive ongoing daily violations
of yet-to-be-established norms for the protection of social media subjects.
It is emerging piecemeal, as with the handling of deleted Tweets, but not
as a unified protocol that everyone recognizes and obeys. Office of
Sponsored Research officers should propose a conference and the NSF/EU
funding agencies should convene it on this precise topic.

So back to your question. My view is that many technological approaches
could be further developed and implemented to somewhat lower the risk to
subjects in digital interviews, but the current nature of the surveillance
technologies (commercial and governmental) may undermine all of them. For
example, you can alter voices, avoid the use of video, mask identities,
stay off of common platforms like Skype/WeChat, use more covert text-only
channels, but some of these steps that enable greater protection for the
subjects may also be red flags for the Office of Human Subjects or for the
surveillance states/technologies that are a genuine threat to the subjects.

My general sense is that while these are huge problems, we can do a better
job as a community understanding competing factors. As Lawrence Lessig
preciently wrote in 1999, the balance between law, norms, markets, and
architecture was tilting then (and now) toward architecture. This
paradigmatic view of the state of regulatory play remains the most
important framework I know of for thinking about future regulation
(balancing mechanisms) in this space. It may take five years to answer your
question fully, but the journey is worth it. Like most hard things, this
will take time and teamwork to move forward.

~Stu

On Sat, May 4, 2019 at 5:45 AM Loretta Anthony-Okeke <
loretta.okeke at manchester.ac.uk> wrote:

> Dear colleagues,
>
> My name is Loretta and I am a Senior Tutor at the University of
> Manchester. I am currently supervising a number of Chinese Master’s
> students for their dissertation projects. Most of them want to either go to
> China and conduct face-to-face interviews with Chinese research
> participants in China, or remain in the UK and conduct online interviews
> with the same sample using WeChat, Skype.
>
> The former is usually deemed medium-risk (i.e. related to research outside
> the EU/EEA, in countries with travel advisory, etc.) but with new data
> protection guidelines in the UK (GDPR and all), university ethics committee
> is now classifying audio/video data collected through these online mediums
> as medium-risk as well, even when the data is collected here in the UK.
>
> I am hoping that you can advise on how students might enhance data
> protection as they outline the main ethical issues with this aspect of
> their research design? Is it wishful thinking that there might be a way
> data collection through Skype/WeChat can be assessed to be low-risk?
>
> Many thanks.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Loretta Anthony-Okeke
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-- 
Dr. Stuart W. Shulman
Founder and CEO, Texifter
Cell: 413-992-8513
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/stuartwshulman