Hi Jill and others, Your student raises some interesting issues, but I think there is no need for “stalking” at all. First of all, there are pretty clear answers around to some of the things that interest him: we know that people don’t know what is accessible about them and that there is a disconnect between their knowledge and the actual state of affairs. Joe Turrow has done work on this. This doesn’t mean that your student can’t discuss this with informants, but it could perhaps be at a more general level. If what interests the student is how people feel about all the information that is out there, that’s quite a different question, and one that would justify presenting the informants with information they didn’t know was out there, but, like Johnny Unger suggested, this could - and probably should - be done together with the the informants. I think that going away and compiling a dossier which is then presented to the informant is not the way to advance research of this kind. In fact, perhaps the right way to proceed would be to present the informants with the tools for finding out the information that’s out there about themselves, and then interviewing them to ask about the process. Or even sitting with them - but on the other side of the screen - as they carry out the process. The extent to which they share with the research information that they have found out is online is then controlled by the informants, while the researcher is enable to probe them as to their feelings about these discoveries. Picking up on another thread, I would also like to register my discomfort with tasking students to find out what they can about their teachers. This is not about us (as teachers) having nothing to hide. It is partly to do with other people in our lives who have not given their consent to be included in the exercise (especially minors), but it is also to do with the proper distance between teachers and students (and between any two people, really), however fraught this notion might be. This takes us back to Jill’s student, who doesn’t actually need to know anything about the informants in order to study their responses to learning that there is far more information out there about them than they thought. It also implies that if we want to teach students about the wealth of information about them out there, that the best, and maybe only, case study they should work on is themselves. Nik

Message: 2 Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2014 12:05:01 +0000 From: Jill Walker Rettberg <Jill.Walker.Rettberg@lle.uib.no> To: Air list <air-l@listserv.aoir.org> Subject: [Air-L] Ethics of a student project Message-ID: <08E59053-552E-40DF-AAF3-E54969BD54D4@lle.uib.no> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

One of our upper-level undergrads would like to write a paper about privacy using a slightly unusual methodology: he wants to find five informants who are willing to let him google them exhaustively in order to find out everything he can about them using legal, public online methods. Then he wants to show each informant the information and interview them, asking things like "did you know this information about you was accessible?" and more in order to find out something about what information people think is available about them, what is actually available about them, and how people feel about all the information out there about them and the possible disconnect between what they think and what is in fact out there.

My gut reaction is that I wouldn't want to let a researcher "stalk" me online like that, and if I wouldn't want to be an informant maybe I shouldn't allow the project, right? But I'm also guessing that the project might be approved by the ethics board so long as there is clear, informed consent. And it'd be interesting to see the results.

But beyond the ethics board: what do you think about a methodology like this? Do you share my gut reaction or am I overreacting? Would you let a student do it? And what might be better ways for a student to do a small scale research project on this topic?

Jill

Jill Walker Rettberg Professor of Digital Culture Dept of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies University of Bergen Postboks 7800 5020 Bergen

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