Dear colleagues, I've been asked to offer some advice to a colleague undertaking research on the participation and interaction behaviors of participants in online worship services, using online ethnography. (This takes place in a German-speaking country, and so GDPR also directly applies.) The particular environment of research is a service held via Zoom; as well, the project will look at (public) Instagram posts and stories. Ideally, the researchers want to record the Zoom service, which would include ca. 24 or more participants simultaneously - which already results in fairly small faces on screen. Most of us can quickly see not only the challenges but also some fairly standard approaches to preserving anonymity, confidentiality, etc. - as well as standard requirements for data management, both from the perspective of Human Subjects Protections as well as the GDPR. My sense is that good research ethics practices for collecting and analyzing the Instagram materials as (more or less) public, are pretty well established. Broadly, the data needs to be handled securely by the researchers, and no direct copies of, e.g., profile photos or direct quotes from texts in final publications unless the person(s) in question are prominent public figures. Generally, no such direct quotes, etc. are needed - rather, pseudonymised and/or aggregate identities will be constructed for use in publication. (But if direct copies / quotes were to be used for some reason - especially as all of this takes place within religiously-defined spaces / events - informed consent from the individual(s) involved, in my view, would be an absolute requirement.) I am less confident about how to treat the possible recording of the Zoom meeting. 1) While asking for informed consent from each participant is feasible - there is the usual researchers' (well-grounded) worry that asking for consent will result in an occasional no, which will thereby reduce the richness of participation, etc. 2) I wonder if something analogous to earlier approaches, e.g., lurking in a chat room or listserve, etc. might work here - i.e., requesting permission to do the recording from the event organizers, being sure to make clear to them all the steps that will be taken to protect individual identities and the data collected overall? Such an approach also strikes me as more ethically defensible than it once might have. For example, our colleague Soraj Hongladarom, among others, has documented how a collective or relational version of informed consent is more appropriate to the Thai society. Others have also argued this approach in relation to many other societies and cultures that entail more relational understandings of selfhood, etc. Such an approach seems increasingly feasible to me, FWIW: as has been abundantly documented and discussed, especially with the rise of social media, notions of selfhood and identity in "the West" have become increasingly relational as well, and so a collective form of informed consent may be all the more defensible. None of this would mitigate, of course, the steps needed to be taken with the material gathered subsequently, starting with secure data management and then avoiding publishing material that could point back to an individual (at least not without specific consent). There is also the fine but important wrinkle here that even with pseudonymization and aggregate identities, persons within the comparatively small communities involved may still recognize an individual source. (My take on this is that careful judgments then need to be made regarding possible risks to specific individuals vis-a-vis benefits of the research, etc.) But I'm sure I'm missing at least a few important points and, even better, suggestions for how to resolve the ethical issues involved here. Hence, comments and suggests - best of all, examples and references in relevant literatures - would be deeply appreciated. Many thanks in advance, - charles -- Professor Emeritus University of Oslo <http://www.hf.uio.no/imk/english/people/aca/charlees/index.html> 3rd edition of Digital Media Ethics now available: <http://politybooks.com/bookdetail/?isbn=9781509533428>