With eye to nostalgia, I (re)raise the following question: are the data that were provided by the ill-fated AoL data release fair game for research? I could *really* use them for a current project; enough so that I will do the research. I may just never actually tell anyone about it. Which strikes me as somehow deeply wrong. For those new to the story, Eszter Hargittai tackled some of the issues here: http://crookedtimber.org/2006/08/07/the-aol-data-mess/ I did a bit here: http://alex.halavais.net/aol-data/ A piece by Nate Anderson appeared in Ars Technica: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060823-7578.html And there were about three dozen messages to AIR-L soon after the release. Now a couple of years have passed, and I have a part of research question that can be effectively answered through these data, and without these data (or similar), answering the question is prohibitively expensive and makes use of an approach less likely to yield valid information. Although the data was used, in part, during a presentation I saw in Copenhagen, I haven't seen any published articles making use of the released data, with the exception of articles that are related to detecting inferences in data, or the privacy concerns of search engines. My personal view is that this is widely publicly available data, and has already done its harm. My use of the data would yield no personally identifiable results. Given that my research does no harm to the subjects, I think a case may be made that it is therefore a reasonable target of investigation. Please tell me why I am wrong, and why my IRB will say I am wrong. Alex -- -- // // This email is // [X] assumed public and may be blogged / forwarded. // [ ] assumed to be private, please ask before redistributing. // // Alexander C. Halavais, cyberflâneur // http://alex.halavais.net //