I'm perhaps joining the conversation after the rain has ended....and because the weather in Chicago is so hot, the air conditioning prompts me to stay indoors and write long-winded replies... I heartily agree with you, Chris (and others in this thread) that a researcher's methodological decisions are vitally connected to the ethics of the project. Brainstorming here, every phase in the research project entails choices that are simultaneously method and ethics choices, where the well-intended researcher can make decisions that have serious ethical consequences, both to the participants being studied and research colleagues. Some of these decision points: I. The choice about accessing the data. This decision involves, among other things, preserving rights of participants and is a methodological choice. II. The choice of data collection tool is an ethical choice--how to capture the stuff of experience later called "data." Here, the researcher will make choices that necessarily abstract experience. One ethical issue is the extent to which the abstraction is a good representation ("good" meaning many things, of course, ethically speaking). One's discipline helps to dictate but does not completely determine the rules of conduct about how one approaches the participants. For example, the fields of psychology, linguistics, and ethnography each have their own ideas (theories, standard practices, rules of thumb...), but the interdisciplinary nature of Internet Studies allows much blending of approaches/tools/theories. Practically speaking, this means a researcher has license to pick and choose from many traditions, and each choice has ethical consequences. III. Choice of tool to analyze the data: The process of making sense of the stuff later called data is a series of choices which are ethical choices, through and through. As we interpret, people's experiences are thematized, categorized, excerpted, generalized, etc. The result of empirical studies inform future studies, build theory. Put heavily, every choice we make as individual researchers informs future knowledge. Seemingly simple choices are never value free or morally neutral. IV. Writing Conventions: Choices about how the participants are framed, active versus passive researcher voice.....depending on who the researcher is writing for, the report will change. The results may also shift, depending on the purpose/audience. V. More writing/editing decisions: Choices about what is absent/omitted from the research report. What got left out? Omissions have consequences for knowledge production, and the decisions are tied up with both method traditions and ethics (voice of the participants, data that might be unfavorable for the researcher's question/results, the researcher's own experiences that influenced the study from beginning to end) So, as you imply, your request for "great ethical disasters" is complicated by the fact that one could question the ethics of a study at multiple points of the project. Mary Gray's "tangent" thread is an example of how one is compelled to critique the ethics of research based on criteria that doesn't fall into the obvious (more discussed) category of violating rights of participants at the outset of the project. .....I guess this is a long winded way of saying: I think the *disasters* are important, but just as important (the word "insidious" comes to mind) are the seemingly minor transgressions, dismissed because they are *just* methodology choices (not ethically based) or even non-decisions because the researcher's discipline requires adherence to certain procedures (therefore not subject to interrogation/reflection). Annette