Harvard's Privacy Meltdown 84
An anonymous reader writes "A team of Harvard researchers has been accused of breaching students' privacy in a project that involved downloading information from some 1,700 Facebook profiles. The case shines a light on emerging ethical challenges faced by academics researching social networks and other online environments."
Facebook privacy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This was already approved (Score:4, Insightful)
> give me one good reason why
> Advertisers are a lot less ethical about it than academic researchers.
You answered your own question.
The difference is that we hold ourselves to a higher standard. The IRB tradition comes in the wake of shockingly immoral research conducted by scientists who didn't see anything wrong with it (Milgram's "just following orders" torture experiment, baby Albert's conditioning, etc). The lesson here is that scientists cannot be trusted to judge the ethical implications of their own experiments, which is why we have the IRB, even for cases that seem to researchers to be perfectly reasonable (just giving a multiple-choice survey)
You are, however, correct that if IRB approval was sought and given, the mistake was theirs. If he used research assistants' facebook accounts to glean the data, as is alleged, there's no way that should have passed IRB.
Re:You put your stuff out in plain view (Score:4, Insightful)
Sound argument. Just like: "you have an easy PIN on your debit card, why are you surprised someone stole your money" or "you were wearing a short skirt at the office, why expect your boss will not harass you".
It is important to refuse unacceptable behavior even if no sufficient safeguards are in place, so the people and organizations learn what they can and can't do. It's like seeing someone slapping his/her kid in a restaurant - if you complain they may snap back at you and tell you to mind your own business, but the impact of a stranger telling them that what they do is wrong is very likely to prevent them from doing it again. This is part of the social contract.
What they did in this case was wrong, and it's a good thing to make a fuss about it and not let people think that privacy is only something that takes place in a doctor's office.
Re:Public or private data? (Score:4, Insightful)
Thanks for finding that; I had skimmed the article and searched it for some keywords but apparently missed that section.
Still, IMHO giving 40,000 students, faculty and staff access to a piece of information should count as "displaying it publicly".
It's as if I put a billboard on campus; then, when a photo of it started circulating on the Internet, I claimed that my privacy was being violated—the billboard was intended to be viewed by Harvard students, faculty, staff, visitors, random people walking aimlessly by, and squirrels...but NO ONE ELSE!