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."
Public or private data? (Score:4, Interesting)
The article fails to mention whether this information from FB profiles was shared or private.
If it's the latter, the crime lies with the person who gave the researchers free access to it in the first place.
If it's the former, I'm off to violate thousands of people's privacy by reading my phone book's white pages.
This was already approved (Score:3, Interesting)
But Mr. Kaufman talks openly about another controversial piece of his data gathering: Students were not informed of it. He discussed this with the institutional review board. Alerting students risked "frightening people unnecessarily," he says.
Basically, the IRB (also sometimes referred to as "ethics review committee") signed off on this. Now, once he's about to publish the results, they pull the plug.
Putting aside the university's hypocrisy (believe me, I can think of far worse privacy breaches), give me one good reason why collecting this kind of aggregate, anonymized data is ok for an advertiser who is studying how to most effectively manipulate people into buying something and generally won't even let people opt out of tracking, but it's not ok for a sociologist to publish aggregate statistical data from mined Facebook profiles. Advertisers are a lot less ethical about it than academic researchers.