Thank you all for the interesting responses so far! If I can think out loud a little bit in response to the 'methods' vs. 'ethics': What if we had not mentioned ethics, and had titled the post 'Great Disasters in Internet Research?' Could we think of a single great disaster that lacks an ethical component? I don't think so. (If we could, wouldn't this imply a natural disaster?) I favor the Rimm study as an example because I think of it as an unambiguous case of research that has been widely critiqued as unethical. Here is a great overview of the debate, with links to about twenty critiques: http://elab.vanderbilt.edu/research/topics/cyberporn/index.htm Thanks to Tom Novak for putting this excellent page together. To endorse Chris's points: I am just a simple practitioner, yet when I see the tendency to equate "research ethics" with a narrower "subject ethics," I don't understand why "ethics" should live within such a small box. It could be that people shy away from identifying something as unethical because calling a researcher unethical is so pejorative, but in the context of this thread I'm not sure why identifying them with a disaster is any better. Even though David and Quentin disagree about HomeNet, we could partially reconcile them by saying that if HomeNet was a disaster, the disaster might best be located in the media coverage of the research. (It would be harder to say the same thing about the Rimm study.) I'd bet if we identify other examples (e.g., David's dot.com valuations) this idea of "flawed" coverage will be a theme. It is still raining here, so are there any other nominations? Christian **** Christian Sandvig christian.sandvig@oii.ox.ac.uk http://www.niftyc.org/