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.
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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