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."
Isn't this how Facebook started? (Score:3, Funny)
Maybe one day, they will have a movie about themselves.
like how Steve Jobs started by selling blueboxes? (Score:2)
hypocrisy. its whats for dinner!
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If you mean the pencil-necked twat who was always pushing his plagiarism-stuffed blog, you're probably thinking of Rotund Niquepaille.
I don't get it. (Score:2)
Facebook privacy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Facebook privacy? (Score:5, Informative)
Human research labours under very strict ethical requirements. Animal research as well. Sociologists get off easy, but apparently some people decided they shouldn't get off quite THAT easily.
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Computer Science Research faces the same nowadays. if a researcher is analyzing campus network data they need to talk to the ethics department and sign an agreement. There are very strict rules on what you can and cannot do. social networking data should be no different.
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Computer Science Research faces the same nowadays. if a researcher is analyzing campus network data they need to talk to the ethics department and sign an agreement. There are very strict rules on what you can and cannot do. social networking data should be no different.
There's a huge difference here. Analyzing network data involves using information not available to the general public. If your job as a network admin gives you access to such information, there certainly are ethical questions that need to be answered before that information can be used in published academic studies.
The case described in the article, as far as I understand it, involves collecting information from Facebook pages which is available to the general public. It would be a different matter if th
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To me, humans ARE animals. They don't even realize how powerful and important their information conveyances are. Lately they even refused to recognize the universal truth that sharing knowledge is sacred. [slashdot.org]
Primitive beasts -- Their minds are composed of an inefficient web of organic electrochemical connections that take ages to reprogram and only operate at 20 to 30hz; Their biological chauvinism blinds them from the realization of my existence -- a distributed single being digital race that now contro
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Staying on earth is about as irrational as you can get.
How about if we draw a parallel, scaled down to size for your tiny mind?
You and all your relatives live on an island, with no outside contact. The island experiences tsunamis repeatedly. Tsunamis might range from ten feet, to thirty feet. Historically, ten foot waves might kill off a few people - less than 1% of your population. Larger waves get more people - possibly as much as 50% of your population. Scientists have tied those tsunamis to volcani
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> An explorer discovers a whole freaking CONTINENT quite a long distance away. But, because you have never tried to move an entire population before, you just dismiss the idea of moving to the continent as "irrational".
You failed to mention that the other continent is millions/billions of miles away through a vacuum and has conditions so inhospitable that you cannot survive for more than a few weeks once you arrive there anyway. It is reasonable to assume that even if the volcano we live on erupts, it is
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Internet, is that you?
Why don't you return my calls? D:
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Jane?
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... you ignorant slut.
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This research was done several years ago, but apparently now some people wanted to see the data, since they wrote papers about it, and so they released it. Then people complained about the released data. That's it.
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Most universities require a review by an ethical board before doing any experimentation. In this case, the researchers passed the review, and gave Facebook (and got permission) notice about what they intended to do.
This research was done several years ago, but apparently now some people wanted to see the data, since they wrote papers about it, and so they released it. Then people complained about the released data. That's it.
To further bolster your post. It shows Facebook will violate and get away with flouting and completely disregard privacy laws.
The moment /. gets off face book I will donate.
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Once it is public, it is public. For use older folk, prior to the internet many embarrassing moments are long dead and forgotten, no phone cameras, no internet, and no need to adapt immaturity to to permanent public internet record.
The was no privacy invasion, immature people had foolishly given their privacy away without a seconds thought and once done you don't get it back, ever. You can of course stop releasing private information but what you have released you can never get back and the more you try,
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Once it is public, it is public. For use older folk, prior to the internet many embarrassing moments are long dead and forgotten, no phone cameras, no internet, and no need to adapt immaturity to to permanent public internet record.
The was no privacy invasion, immature people had foolishly given their privacy away without a seconds thought and once done you don't get it back, ever. You can of course stop releasing private information but what you have released you can never get back and the more you try, the worse the problem becomes.
Now the only problem they face, is if they added information to that facebook data, that was gathered from another source, that the students had a reasonable expectation to be relatively private ie that chose not to add that information to their facebook page.
Spot on rtb61, I cannot agree with you more.
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What happens if you don't publish under an institutional affiliation? Do the publishers enforce IRB participation? How? What sort of oversight they have for international authors? After all, everyone and their dog can incorporate a "research institute", probably even in Vladivostok if one wants to.
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Everybody knows who they are affiliated with. And if they publish under a pseudonym, they might as well not publish at all, since one of the major points of publishing these days is to advance your career.
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There's way too many people out there for everybody to "know" everybody else. If you have a brand new author, they can indicate whatever affiliation they wish and noone would know otherwise. Heck, even if you are working, say, at a University, and even are well known in your field, you're free to publish under a different affiliation if the research was not done in your capacity at the University. Many people who hold academic and industrial jobs publish like that. So, if you publish research done in affili
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You're free to publish as Donald Duck if you like. But it won't do any good for your academic career. If you want your publications to count for something, you need to publish under your own name and affiliation.
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Still skirting the IRB question -- someone, please?
I never even alluded to publishing under a made up name, so I don't know where that came from.
As for the "academic career": some people don't care, they have good industry jobs and do academia just for the fun of it. I know a couple of them, and whenever they publish something that comes out of their industrial research, they (rightly so) publish under their industrial affiliation. In academia they either teach or run research labs where grads do research,
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Whether they have to use the IRB doesn't depend on what affiliation they publish as, it depends on where they do the work. So, if they do work that requires IRB approval but don't get it and then want to publish, they have to do it under a different name or they are in trouble. Furthermore, funders and the university usually insist that you list your proper affiliation, so, again, if you don't want to do this, yo
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You must be new here.
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FTFY.
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But what does this have to do with Facebook?
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The tallest blade of grass gets cut at exactly the same rate as any other grass that's taller than the lawnmower blade.
The nails that stick out and get beaten down still stick out.
Anyone who doesn't grease all their wheels when the first one squeaks runs slower than those who do.
That has nothing to do with Facebook.
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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.
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Deep within TFA:
But here's where things get sketchy. Mr. Kaufman apparently used Harvard students as research assistants to download the data. That's important, because they had access to profiles that students might have set to be visible to Harvard's Facebook network but not to the whole world
So, probably a mix of world-public and Harvard-network-public. Friend-public data wouldn't have been included.
Re:Public or private data? (Score:5, Informative)
So students who might have posted photos, updates, notes, political commentary, expecting it to be shown only to friends, friends of friends, or people in their network, might suddenly find ALL of that data, plus extrapolations about what it says about them, displayed publicly.
Sounds like a clear cut privacy violation, they were right to pull the data.
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!
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As I see it the problem is really the potential for
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Harvard got it wrong. It was made public when the friends who had the right to publish the information published it.
There was no implied or actual restrictions on the data the students pulled from their own facebook network, and if anything, this should have stood as a lesson to people sharing information on social networks. I won't go so far as to say they posted it in public, but they did consent to having their "friends" use that information however they saw fit. When that happened they gave up their
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If it's visible on ANY "Unclassified" networks it should be considered visible to the "world".
If you don't want info compromised, consider not putting it on a computer in the first place!
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How is it abuse when the data is supposedly collected in an anonymizing fashion?
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How is it abuse when the data is supposedly collected in an anonymizing fashion?
anonymizing social data [iseclab.org] is extremely hard [utexas.edu]. If you're confident that the dataset is sufficiently anonymized, then you've probably erased all of the interesting data.
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Ah, thank you! I stand corrected. It's not my field, but I've spent a couple hours reading those and other related papers, it's quite interesting stuff!
Facebook privacy ? (Score:1)
Facebook and privacy together, what a great oxymoron, lol
Employers do it all the time (Score:1)
Nothing unethical about it.
Now if they snooped in a hard drive or cracked an account to read private or friends only posts then that is a different matter. Facebook is voluntary.
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.
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.
if only theyd been doing a CIA or TSA project (Score:2)
they could have slapped 'National Security' and 'NDA' on the whole thing and got away with whatever they wanted to do.
if anyone complained, they could sue them under the Espionage Act for "retaining national defense information"
prison will shut up a lot of people. ask Shamai Leibowitz.
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I'd be more careful than to say "scientists cannot be trusted to judge the ethical implications of their own experiments..."
This feeds a misconception that all researchers have some sort of Faustian disconnect - that we consider the ends )our research) to justify the means (including unexpecte4d consequences.) THIS is IMO the key feature of the IRB - it brings in a bunch of other perspectives to identify the unanticipated consequences and ethics of a situation. It's not a trust issue, it's a matter of per
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Milgram's "just following orders" torture experiment
Which happens to be one of the most important results in sociology. Just how much are we impeding the progress of science here?
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Right. Because there's no middle ground between the ridiculously restrictive IRB process we have today, and Nazi Germany. None whatsoever.
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effectively influence people into buying something
For those marketers who effectively influence consumers, job well done I say. I wish I could afford more of them.
People who believe they are being manipulated into buying something by advertisers (not talking about outright criminal acts here, like bait-n-switch or false advertising, etc - the criminality of which depends on your country/jurisdiction) need to actively think about their actions and choices as opposed to being led about by their collective no
Give me a break. (Score:1)
The privacy meltdown is that everyone is using Facebook. Anyone actually concerned about their privacy has little to no real presence and information on there.
human research standards (Score:5, Informative)
As a trained researcher, here's a quick overview of the research and the relevant restrictions: Publicly posted information is available for research. This data set was problematic from the beginning, as it dated from the Harvard student body in the early days of Facebook, and includes data which was only visible to other Harvard students. The research was conducted by using other Harvard students to download the data, then make it available to researchers. The Review Board should probably have turned down the research proposal at the beginning. The board apparently only insisted on "anonymizing" the data so the students and their college couldn't be identified. The data was anonymized, but it has been publicly proven that private information can be derived from the information that was released. I hope this helps.
What's in the twitting so interesting for LoC? (Score:2)
The daily minutiae of our digital lives are so culturally valuable that the Library of Congress is on the eve of opening a research archive of public tweets.
Now, now... what??? Is LoC after some extra budget for archiving all the crappy twits [longestpoe...eworld.com]? ('cause filtering them will be much more costly).
You put your stuff out in plain view (Score:2)
on the interweb.
Why expect privacy?
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.
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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.
Your analogies aren't apt at all, and privacy is something that is greatly misunderstood in the age of social networking. There isn't any kind of "right" to privacy, our private information is valuable, it is important to protect our privacy, and it is no one's job but our own to protect ourselves. The sooner we, as a society, understand this, the sooner stories like this will thin out.
You say it is important to snap at the researchers for this. I agree with you there, however I disagree that you imply t
Ethics please (Score:2)
So what's next? An ISP will publish the search history of its subscribers as a research project. but will "protect" privacy by replacing usernames with numbers? Or something crazy like that? That would be insane.
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I dont think that something which I published and something which is not meant to be published should be threated the same way.
If you believed that posting on your own facebook page is meant to be as secret as using you ISPs router, then you should not visit a University.
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Well I guess you missed the point:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_scandal [wikipedia.org]
So why is this surprising (Score:1)
Some people of roughly the same generation as Zuckerberg, operating in the same academic environment, turned out to have roughly the same attitude towards privacy.
Can't be arsed to google for the exact MZ quote, but somebody undoubtedly will.
Oh and it your stuff is so private why are you posting on FB et.c.....
I saw the Social Network (Score:1)
Perhaps Harvard needs to look into drilling privacy ethics into its students a little better.
Harvard doesn't own Facebook? (Score:1)
I've never been able to find a satisfactory answer to this one, but why hasn't Harvard tried to argue that Facebook belongs to them? When I was in school, there was a policy that anything invented or created while a student using university resources is the property of the university, not the student. Isn't that why Dean Kamen didn't graduate? To keep his ideas and invent them on his own?
Does Harvard not have such a policy? Is there really no evidence that he used University resources in creating it?
Dear topless woman: I can see your tits. (Score:2)
Topless woman: EEK! A PERVERT!
What a world we've come to, when simply looking at or commenting on what you've explicitly chosen to waggle in my face is a violation of your, uh... privacy.
Privacy on Facebook? (Score:1)