Hello Maria, I am a doc student, but since I am doing my dissertation using publicly available blogs with bloggers who have pseudonymous identities, I've had to think about the issue of privacy quite a bit so I figured I would share my process thus far. First, I searched out researchers doing research such as this, and naturally I went to my advisor and asked her what she did. She explained what she did, but said that I needed to read up on the topic. So I read up on what others were doing. I ran across AoIR's document on ethics and found a lot of useful advice/information in Markham and Baym's edited book Internet Inquiry, which lead me to many other authors that were discussing this topic. If you want to email me privately, I can send you some of the articles and books I found most useful. Second, I decided that since this topic isn't black and white, I would include a section within my literature review on what is currently being done in instances such as this, what privacy in internet research means, , etc. I also discussed measures that I would be taking in my method chapter. I know this isn't typically included but when I defended my proposal my committee was happy I had addressed it so thoroughly, because they had questions about this. Plus, all the reading and research helped me come to my decisions. Third, I contacted the Human Subjects Committee at my university and discussed it with them. They determined that if it was publicly available to anyone with Internet access then they would treat it as such. Of course I would need consent/permission from the participants that I chose to interview. In my most recent discussion over my IRB application, they wanted me to include a statement within my consent form (for the interviewees) saying that if they chose to keep their blog identity that there is a chance it would be linked to their blog. Although, I've decided I will interview all of my bloggers, initially they approved that I would be able to include blog posts from bloggers that I was not interviewing and would not need consent since it was a public text without log-in or password. I was able to work with the review board on creating a consent form that I could send via email and their response indicated consent. Of course there was more to the process and I haven't conducted my research yet so... Since it was technically ok by the review board, I had to figure out my own ethics as a researcher. One main question I had was about perceived privacy - do people really think that what they write or say in a specific context has the potential to be published and brought out to a larger audience that wouldn't normally see what they said (i.e. an academic journal when they are just writing a blog)? Was I comfortable pulling direct quotes from blogs without telling the blogger when they can be traced back to the blog even if I changed the blog name and URL? There were many other questions that I had and it took me many months to figure them out, and I'm sure as I conduct the research more questions will arise. I probably would have email this group if I would have been a part of it then. In the end, I've decided to do what I am comfortable with as a researcher within obvious research ethic boundaries. I hope you don't mind me including these, but here are some questions that I thought might be useful to you as you make your decision. In my process I found answering similar questions helpful so I figured I would include them. Are you quoting all of the comments or are you just categorizing them. If you are categorizing and publishing the results in aggregate then is it likely that where the information came from will be discovered? When you Google (or whatever search engine you use) the quotes do the sources of data pop up? Do people have to log-in in order to post the comments? Can anyone without log-in read the comments? What do you consider sensitive? Would your commenters feel that what you think is sensitive is the same thing as what they consider sensitive (i.e. do you know the groups well enough to make this determination)? Jennifer Myers Doctoral Candidate at Florida State University jennifer.b.myers@gmail.com