I was just having this discussion with a student after a webinar on Ashley Madison that we hosted for students here at the Berkeley I School - thought I'd share some of what I shared with the student in case folks find it useful. The short response is: it's difficult to give an all-or-nothing sort of answer to the question of using stolen data, as there are a number of considerations we need to fold in. (I won't speak directly to Patreon, but a lot of the context below applies, I think.) In particular, it's important to keep in mind means and ends in a professional context. To illustrate, we can consider two main groups that have an interest in the contents of the AM data dump: academic researchers and journalists. One of the primary "ends" of journalism, at least ideally, is service to the public interest. With that in mind, we permit or tolerate - from a professional ethical perspective, at least - journalists to mine and explore stolen information so long as it is for reasons that can be justified in terms of public interest. There are lots of precedents here, from Watergate to Snowden to Wikileaks cables and so on. A good example in this particular case is the Gizmodo reporting on Ashley Madison <http://gizmodo.com/the-fembots-of-ashley-madison-1726670394>: exposing the "fembots" (or fake, automated profiles) of Ashley Madison lays bare a deceptive practice that consumers and the FTC have an legitimate interest in knowing about. In another example, there are cases of individuals reporting on public figures that might be included in the database - in the aftermath of the hack, some outlets have reported on the private emails of the CEO of AM parent company Avid Life Media (whose relevance to the hack is obvious) while others broke the news that conservative "family values" cultural figure Josh Duggar was using the service. I think the case for investigating the CEO here (by, for example, exposing his private emails) is ethically justifiable (though I think the case for exposing Duggar is not as straightforward, but it's a legitimate open question - by way of a counterargument, Dan Savage, in particular, really, really thinks that exposing Duggar is justifiable <http://www.bioethics.net/2015/09/ashley-madison-using-stolen-data/>.) At the same time, we would not tolerate journalists targeting and exposing the details of non-public figures in the dataset. That would be bullying or harassment - and definitely unethical. For academic researchers, our ends aren't *necessarily* public interest (though there can be clear connections to the public interest in some cases, like the West Virginia researchers that exposed VW's cheating software <http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/advanced-cars/how-professors-caught-vw-cheating>). Setting aside romantic notions of progress and "the glory of science"), the ends of research can be variously ontological, epistemological, political, etc... Over time, we've decided - in part as a response to past ethical transgressions - that, regardless of the ends of our research, there are certain values we shouldn't compromise in the pursuit of knowledge - chief among them is the value of respect. As the Belmont Report and other research documents, the notion of informed consent is one of the main ways (if not *the* main way) in which we operationalize the value of respect in practice. The challenge that the Ashley Madison data poses for researchers, then, is that those included in the dataset never consented to being a part of research (and, indeed, it could probably be assumed that many of the affected individuals would definitely not agree to disclose many of these intimate details to researchers without certain guarantees of privacy). So, I'm not sure what the legal status of conducting research on a stolen database might be (I don't have the legal background to answer that question) - but from an ethical perspective, concerns with consent and respect are still absolutely pressing. So, rather than giving a blanket "yes" or "no" from an ethical perspective, I think it is important to consider 1) the kinds of research questions you would want to ask and why, 2) what the relationship of your research might be to your institution's IRB (if you're at the kind of institution that has one, anyway) given that the dataset contains human subjects, and 3) what possible further harms your research might cause if not approached properly. (Plus: even if consent is out of the picture, we still have other important values to which we can appeal - such as beneficence, justice, care, etc...). -Anna ----- Anna Lauren Hoffmann Professional Faculty & Postdoctoral Researcher School of Information University of California, Berkeley On Wed, Oct 7, 2015 at 2:35 PM, Jeremiah Spence <jeremiah.spence@gmail.com> wrote:
I was following the 2600 forums after the Ashley Madison hack. People were wanting to explore that data trove and the consensus after some input from a journalist was that it was legal to obtain the data trove once it was released to the public. But it is illegal to disclose sensitive data such as passwords or credit card numbers.
This does not answer the colleague's original question regarding the use of the data in a formal research setting. Perhaps the "grey hat" academic solution would be to anonymize the resulting data, in much the similar way we usually treat survey data. That was analysis can be performed and no individual is "injured" as a result of the research.
Jeremiah, Ph.D.
On Wed, Oct 7, 2015 at 4:29 PM, Alex Leavitt <alexleavitt@gmail.com> wrote:
A similar case study might be the history of the ENRON email data set. It went through multiple iterations of availability and takedowns as it was slowly edited over time to remove emails. People still use it as a canonical dataset, but it is certainly still controversial, and especially was when it was first made available.
---
Alexander Leavitt PhD Candidate USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism http://alexleavitt.com Twitter: @alexleavitt <http://twitter.com/alexleavitt>
On Wed, Oct 7, 2015 at 1:54 PM, Peter Timusk <peterotimusk@gmail.com> wrote:
I think one could look a little at the consequences of what you are doing. Seems you are trying to make money by researching funding data is that right? I find that unethical but I find all kinds of data mining unethical. There are reasons to use your same skill sets that could benefit society. May be I don't understand what your end result is about.
Peter Timusk peterotimusk@gmail.com I do not speak for my employer or charities or political parties or unions I volunteer with or belong to, unless otherwise noted.
On Oct 7, 2015, at 4:11 PM, Nathaniel Poor <natpoor@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello list-
I recently got into a discussion with a colleague about the ethics of using hacked data, specifically the Patreon hacked data (see here:
http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/10/gigabytes-of-user-data-from-hack-of-...
).
He and I do crowdfunding work, and had wanted to look at Patreon, but as far as I can tell they have no easy hook into all their projects (for scraping), so, to me this data hack was like a gift! But he said there was no way we could use it. We aren't doing sentiment analysis or anything, we would use aggregated measures like funding levels and then report things like means and maybe a regression, so there would be no identifiable information whatsoever derived from the hacked data in any of our resulting work (we might go to the site and pull some quotes).
I looked at the AoIR ethics guidelines ( http://aoir.org/reports/ethics2.pdf ), and didn't see anything specifically about hacked data (I don't think "hacked" is the best word, but I don't like "stolen" either, but those are different discussions).
One relevant line I noticed was this one: "If access to an online context is publicly available, do members/participants/authors perceive the context to be public?" (p. 8) So, the problem with the data is that it's the entire website, so some was private and some was public, but now it's all public and everyone knows it's public.
To me, I agree that a lot of the data in the data-dump had been intended to be private -- apparently, direct messages are in there -- but we wouldn't use that data (it's not something we're interested in). We'd use data like number of funders and funding levels and then aggregate everything. I see that some of it was meant to be private, but given the entire site was hacked and exported I don't see how currently anyone could have an expectation of privacy any more. I'm not trying to torture the definition, it's just that it was private until it wasn't.
I can see that some academic researchers -- at least those in computer security -- would be interested in this data and should be able to publish in peer reviewed journals about it, in an anonymized manner (probably as an example of "here's a data hack like what we are talking about, here's what hackers released").
I also think that probably every script kiddie has downloaded the data, as has every grey and black market email list spammer, and probably every botnet purveyor (for passwords) and maybe even the hacking arm of the Chinese army and the NSA. My point here is that if we were to use the data in academic research we wouldn't be publicizing it to nefarious people who would misuse it since all of those people already have it. We could maybe help people who want to use crowdfunding some (hopefully!) if we have some results. (I guess I don't see that we would be doing any harm by using it.)
So, what do people think? Did I miss something in the AoIR guidelines? I realize I don't think it's clear either way, or I wouldn't be asking, so probably the answers will point to this as a grey area (so why do I even ask, I am not sure).
But I'm not looking for "You can't use it because it's hacked," because I don't think that explains anything. I could counter that with "It is publicly available found data," because it is, although I don't think that's the best reply either. Both lack nuance.
-Nat
-- Nathaniel Poor, Ph.D. http://natpoor.blogspot.com _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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-- -------------------- Jeremiah Spence, Ph.D. Technologist. Analyst. Consultant. jeremiahspence.com jeremiah.spence@gmail.com _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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