Hi Peter, Charles, it seems one crucial issue is whether the law system has both privacy laws and laws governing the protection of research, and how these relate to each other - generally and in court decisions. Best --u At 9:32 Uhr +0100 17.12.2007, Charles Ess wrote:
Now my question for cross border scholars are the research ethics much different based on the privacy laws in Canada, the USA, Europe or Asia? yes!
Of course I am more interested in privacy law differences than the actual ethics. But I am curious if there is an effect from the laws on the ethics? yes!
A starting point, actually, is the AoIR ethical guidelines for Internet research (2002 - from the website) which, among other things, paid careful attention to the relationship between diverse cultural expectations re. privacy, data privacy protection laws, and research ethics.
Roughly, the E.U. has the most stringent data privacy protection laws - but, until recently at least, nothing like the U.S. IRBs. Research ethics, at the risk of a wildly wholesale and overgeneralized statement, at least in the northern countries, are learned and enforced more informally than formally. (Especially in Germany and Scandinavia, there is a prevailing trust that people will do the right thing - and if they don't, the error can be corrected more effectively through informal rather than formal channels.)
In Japan, China and Thailand, there is a nascent attention to Internet research ethics - but shaded, as one might expect, by very different traditions regarding the understanding of "privacy" (generally more negative than in a West shaped by modernity and industrialization since the 1700s, and, when positive, more collective-familiar than individual). Comparatively limited data privacy protections exist - but the situation is changing, in part as cultures, and thereby values/assumptions/beliefs re. privacy, etc. hybridize (in part through the influence of our beloved Internet ...)
Clearly, all of this is work very much in progress. We heard from scholars and researchers from around the globe at this year's AoIR panel on research ethics, chaired by Elizabeth Buchanan (the chair of the AoIR ethics working group). Notes from that session should be online soon - and I would look for more to come from the forthcoming _International Journal on Information Research Ethics_ (the first issue will be online soon). Interestingly, a highlight for me was to learn from our European colleagues that U.S.-like IRBs were becoming more and more the norm for them as well.
In the meantime, the best single article I know of recently on cross-cultural comparisons of this sort is Dan Burk's Privacy and Property in the Global Datasphere, in S. Hongladarom and C. Ess (eds.), _Information Technology Ethics: Global Perspectives_, 94-107. (Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2007.)
there's a ton more out there (including some of my own articles in _Ethics and Information Technology_) - but I hope this is a helpful start!
What would be even better would be for our colleagues in different parts of the world to report / comment on this - Elizabeth and I will take careful notes!
On that happy thought,
cheers, - c.
Distinguished Research Professor, Global Studies Center <http://www.drury.edu/gp21> Drury University Springfield, MO 65802 USA
Guest Professor (fall, 2007) Department of Media Studies IT Park Helsingforsgade 14 8200 Aarhus N Denmark Office: (45) 8942 9219 Mobile: (45) 2986 8967
President, Association of Internet Researchers <www.aoir.org> Co-Editor, International Journal of Internet Research Ethics http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/SOIS/cipr/ijire.html Co-chair, CATaC conferences <www.catacconference.org> Professor II, Globalization and Applied Ethics Programmes <http://www.anvendtetikk.ntnu.no/pres/bridgingcultures.php>
Exemplary persons seek harmony, not sameness. -- Analects 13.23
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