[Air-L] WeChat/Skype ethical issues

[Loretta Anthony-Okeke]

Many thanks Stu, for your interest in this.
I think you are spot on about how problematic the ethics review process is now especially in this age of new forms of data

On 4 May 2019, at 12:03 pm, Shulman, Stu <stu at texifter.com<mailto:stu at texifter.com>> wrote:

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<mailto: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
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