Using Empirical Data to Reason about Internet Research Ethics

Abstract

Abstract. Internet technology holds significant potential to respond to business, educational, and social needs, but this same technology poses fundamentally new challenges for research ethics. To reason about ethical questions, researchers and ethics review boards typically rely on dichotomies like "public" versus "private," "published" vs. "unpublished," and "anonymous" vs. "identified." However, online, these categories are blurred, and the underlying concepts require reinterpretation. How then are we to reason about ethical dilemmas about research on the Internet? To date, most work in this area has been grounded in a combination of theoretical analysis and experience gained by people in the course of conducting Internet research. In these studies, ethical insight was a welcome byproduct of research aimed primarily at exploring other ends. However, little work has used experimental methods for the primary purpose of contributing to our reasoning about the ethics of research online. In this paper, we discuss the role of empirical data in helping us answer questions about Internet research ethics. As an example, we review results of one study in which we gauged participant expectations of privacy in public chatrooms (Hudson & Bruckman, 2004b). Using an experimental approach, we demonstrate how participants' expectations of privacy conflict with the reality of these public chatrooms. Although these empirical data cannot provide concrete answers, we show how they influence our reasoning about the ethical issues of obtaining informed consent.

End-User Privacy in Human-Computer Interaction

“…Further ethical issues are raised by Hudson et al [147], who report on a study of privacy in web-based chat rooms. Hudson and Bruckman note that obtaining informed consent from research participants may skew the observations by destroying the very expectations of privacy that are the object of study.…”

“…For example, Hudson and Bruckman show that people have a far greater expectation of privacy in Internet Relay Chat than can be realistically provided given the design and implementation of IRC [147]. Thus, in addition to balancing plausible deniability with social translucency, designers must also consider users' expectations of those properties.…”

Being a good spy: Legitimizing access to web-based observation

“…I still think it is permissible to 'wrong' people if the wrong that is committed is minor when compared to the importance of the research. Hudson and Bruckman (2005) carried out their study without obtaining consent from participants, doing what they could to reduce potential harm. They left out groups that were sensitive and considered the scientific value of their possible findings greater than the drawbacks associated with conducting the process.…”

Accounting for Privacy in Citizen Science

“…The CSCW community has a rich history of promoting and supporting citizen science through research on topics including volunteer motivation [13,37]; newcomer acclimation to online communities [27]; movement through communities and supporting platforms [18]; communitybased validation strategies [44]; and the value of information and communication tools and technologies [20,42]. An additional line of inquiry that unites citizen science practitioners [3,31] and the broader CSCW community [5,7,14,15,16] is understanding and protecting privacy in digital contexts that challenge existing research ethics practices and norms.…”

“…Ethical practices for researchers who wish to collect pervasive data are an ongoing topic of discussion and debate in CSCW [4,6,7,14,15,16,22,35,41]. A growing body of empirical work seeks to support this discussion [16].…”