Lois, thank you again for your thoughtful summary of why most of the research conducted in and with the Internet is far from being ethically questionable. In particular that debate about Google's street view imho highlighted the fact that there is really no need for questioning cases where individuals place information about *themselves* on the Internet and that information is then used in research. Google places information about *others* on the Internet and does so in an all-encompassing way. In light of this comparison it seems unacceptable that time is wasted by criticizing trained researchers for responsible work. Furthermore, by using the Internet for research we may produce knowledge that here and there is to the benefit of someone (think of Berners-Lee's research, for example ;-). By conducting research on the Internet instead of offline places we often reduce harm. To use a blunt example by Michael Birnbaum: no case was heard of or seems logically plausible of research participants being injured or killed in Internet research. Compare that to the millions of cases where research participants are invited to physical research laboratories and take their car to drive there... Internet scientists and Internet researchers change the way research is conducted, often to the better. Don't bug them with absurd "what if" scenarios, fight Google's Orwellian practices instead. Best --u At 10:03 Uhr -0400 14.8.2007, Lois Ann Scheidt wrote:
But to complicate your argument below (and Hughie's in a separate thread), a couple of thought experiments:
Say I place content on a "publicly accessible" webpage without creating any incoming links or notifying anyone. Web crawlers won't find it. A search engine won't index it. While on the open and public Internet, unless a random URL-generator happens to guess the precise address of the page, no one will ever read it. Is this content "fair game for researchers"?
I don't profess to be a "hardware" or a "search engine" expert, but I can tell you that the above thought experiment only works if you have complete control of the hardware and software involved in the webpage. Many hosts webpages link to pages of folks hosted by their service. It's a term and condition of service...so it's not nearly as easy to be completely off the search engines as one may think.
Beyond that point, for those of us that do "in the wild" research...how would we find your thought experiment if it's not indexed? I guess it would be possible to have a crawler that would randomly generate URLs and check their validity. That might be useful for some research question, but in that case I would assume the unit of analysis would be the URL, at most, and more likely it would be a proof of concept test of some kind - so no human subject would be involved.
Now beyond that, I would argue that from a research perspective the blog was still open to study, if it can be found. I say that because the best terrestrial analogy I can think of to your thought experiment is someone who posted a broadsheet on a pole but with a cover over the broadsheet...lots of things could pull that cover off...the wind, rain, or a passing person who didn't like the color of the cover. In short, a person who would go to that much trouble to hide in plan sight...well it's still plan sight.
I think that's part of why this "what if" game gets bogus, a person who would make an effort to do the above, isn't all that likely to be "real" and I study real people. "What if's" are valuable in these discussions but again we have to remember that we can dream up far more elaborate scenarios then we are ever likely to see in the wild.
Consider a different scenario: Walking down the street with a friend, I comment on the fact my rent check bounced, and she offers condolences. We're in public. We make the utterances loud enough that someone next to us could easily hear it, but not loud enough that someone across the street can. Now, this is a public utterance - we didn't have the conversation behind locked (password-protected) doors. Can this be archived for research? Better yet, can we setup microphones to automatically record every conversation uttered in public? Does the fact these conversations *can* be recorded and archived mean they, by default, *should be*? I feel we're saying the same about utterances on the Web - so what's the fundamental difference from a user perspective between the street and the Web? Both are a place where we engage in conversations and maintain relationships....
I fear we're confusing what the Internet *is* and *is capable of* with *how it is used*. Yes, comments left on a personal blog are open for anyone to see. Yes, discussion board conversations can be archived. But that's not, I suspect, going through the mind of many casual users of this technology. It is a medium for communication, for connecting with people. I leave messages on my neighborhood parents discussion board because that's how I connect with that community. I use my real name because I'm among friends. Does that mean my comments are de facto fair game for any researcher who wants to scrape the database?
Actually I think the "confusion" is at a different level. Your second thought experiment gets at it fairly well. When I am designing research I can only know the "potential" harms, not the actual ones...potentials are before the fact, actuals are retrospective.
Let's change your experiment a bit. You are home and in the shower getting ready to meet your friend. You think about the stuff you are going to tell them and you decide to mention your bounced check. And maybe it crosses your mind that you need to be careful where you say that so fewer people over hear.
When you decide to tell your friend you don't know who is really around...or what someone who overhears might do with the utterance. You only know that you are going to do your best to make sure that you are careful.
Same with research design and human subjects work.
We have to learn from actual happenings but if we sit and do statistically, oh my a qualitative researcher just used the s-word, improbable "what-if's" then no research will happen at all.
Personally I believe the following -
- Research is never risk-free. Neither is life. If you are working toward absolute zero risk in your research you will either give up the pursuit, or build a protocal for your research that lies to you. Yes there are ways to protect YOUR subjects but most of them can "endanger" others in the process (more on this below). Merry Christmas that is not zero risk, it's just minimal risk for the research and probably a heck of a lot of your work that didn't buy anyone more "safety."
All of the aforementioned "harm" and "protective" terms were used only as part of the discussion, because what is the real chance of harm from most of our research, one-in-a-million, one-in-a-billion, one-in-a-trillion? Medical experiments don't get to absolute zero risk...they just shift the potential risk - which may be minimal as well - from the researcher to the patient...unless something unexpected happens and then the risk is back on the researcher. And how do they "know" the potential risks? From computer simulations - based on facts known from old (and often questionable) human experiments, and/or from animal trials. So their "potential" risk knowledge comes from analyzing actual risk after a trial, not from "what if's."
- I design research...I predict the potential harm from my "intervention" and I work to minimize the risk ("minimal risk" is the operative term). I do not mind read or assume my position as researcher places me in a superior position and that my subjects need special protections from me.
Sorry folks but I truly find that last concept to be pretty funny. I am not injecting people with foreign substances, I look at artifacts they produced and placed online. Personally, I have never had a artifact's author/artist come back to me after I published and complain. I have had a single author question my use of his work without permission - I work with teens remember - and so we talked and by the end of the discussion he understood and told me he was pleased his work was in the paper he just thought he HAD to give permission first. Plus he found out by tracking his visitor logs and finding I had visited repeatedly, so it was not because of an unpleasant experience on his part.
Now before I sound like a totally heartless researcher who only sees her subjects as things...when nothing could be further from the truth...if even one of the kids I work with were hurt by my research I would have a crisis of conscience. But again I am not God, I know that if I had done the best job I could do working through my research design and trying to predict all the potential harms likely to happen with my intervention then I have done everything I can do.
Some years ago, I wrote a classroom paper that discussed why I don't pseudonymize my subjects in my chatroom research. The simple reason is that there is no way I could come up with nicknames that would cover the participants and not potentially deflect on to another chatroom user. I'm good but I'm not THAT good.
So if I did pseudonymize I might protect my participants but in that one-in-a-billion case where someone was in harm's way from something I did...I might well have created the situation rather then hidden it. I'll let you "what if'ers" out there run that one through the filters.
Lois