Comments on: Is it Ethical to Harvest Public Twitter Accounts without Consent?

By: Paul Dorio

Paul Dorio — Sat, 28 May 2011 12:48:41 +0000

@ Bonnie: Anything that is posted online should be assumed to be public. I am even cautious about how much I say in private emails, DMs, etc., because I just don’t know how private those forms of communication really are.

Excellent discussion. Great comments. Fascinating read. Thanks everyone.

By: DrV

DrV — Sat, 28 May 2011 12:29:21 +0000

As someone that interfaces with patients, I have found that patients don’t always fully understand what’s public and what isn’t. A patient @messaged me recently (unsolicited) and thought I was the only person seeing it. Potentially problematic and often not considered.

By: bonnie Shirley

bonnie Shirley — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 06:16:45 +0000

I looked for a discussion on this because I have come across a fansite open to thousands every day, that is publishing tweets. The tweets themselves are innocuous, about a popular actor, however, the tweeters account and address are often also published, so that one can go in and see the tweet about the actor directly. I have seen some really embarrassing private information written below or above the mined tweet.

These people do not know their information is being disseminated to a widely read fan site. Is it reasonable that they should expect a national fan site might publish their address?

I really do not know,but I imagine, given the state of privacy today, that the answer is yes. Any legal cases on point?

By: Piter De Vrie

Piter De Vrie — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 01:02:52 +0000

I think the concern is that people don’t read TOS so they don’t really expect it. There’s so much legalese out there that I the average person must totally ignore it.

It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.

By: Gunther Eysenbach

Gunther Eysenbach — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 23:00:28 +0000

Hi Michael,
I simply dispute that ANYBODY who tweets (regardless of whether he has read the privacy policy or not) does so under the expectation of privacy or having a “limited” audience (if they want to do that, there is a privacy setting for that). Anybody who tweets sees on a daily basis that others are retweeting their tweets or quoting from their tweets also appear in search engines and on the twitter homepage itself (as well as on the public timeline http://twitter.com/public_timeline) etc. I wonder of you have ANY empirical data supporting your assertion? Ethics should be grounded in evidence, and I simply don’t see any evidence supporting this claim.
If you argue that people don’t understand social media or twitter in particular, or not read the privacy policy (which is perhaps true), then I am not sure what problem you would solve with obtaining formal informed consent, where you can’t be sure if they read or understood your informed consent documents either.
I also find the statement that “users of social media services typically expect their activities to be visible — or of any interests — to a limited audience” not very helpful – social media is a fuzzy term for a vast array of different services. There are many different forms of “social media”, and different social media lie on different points on a continuum in regards to that “expectation”. I would argue that twitter is on a point in that continuum where it is clear to everybody – by just looking at the twitter homepage and the thousands of websites tapping into the twitter API and aggregating, analyzing, and re-displaying that information – that there is not a “finite number of active followers” seeing or analyzing your tweets. Even the “trending topics” on the twitter homepage derive from tweets (and what we do in our research is not much different from plotting trending topics), so again, where are the data for that “expectation”?

By: Michael Zimmer

Michael Zimmer — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 22:13:36 +0000

Gunther, I fear you are missing my point. The ethical calculus isn’t a simple public/private binary, but involves a more nuanced balancing of user expectations and right of refusal. First, based on related empirical evidence, a low % of users ever read privacy policies, so that’s not very strong of an argument to justify harvesting ethically. Second, users of social media services typically expect their activities to be visible — or of any interests — to a limited audience. While, technically, anyone can “see” my tweets, only a finite number of active followers actually see them on a daily basis. That is part of my expectation of the visibility and usage of the service, and I feel that expectation should be taken into consideration by researchers (no quotes necessary, please) when a decision is made whether/how to mine such information sources.

By: Gunther Eysenbach

Gunther Eysenbach — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 21:42:42 +0000

Oh, please, give me a break.
While I would be the last to argue that everything on the Internet is “public” (in fact, I was one of the first pointing out that it is _not_, see our 2001 paper in the BMJ at http://www.bmj.com/content/323/7321/1103.full), BUT TWITTER IS PUBLIC – NO QUESTION ABOUT IT.

Tweets (from the public stream) are like to be treated like blogs (microblogs) and webpages – PUBLIC. No consent required for analyzing them, unless of course they are DMs (which are like emails – confidential) or sent to your “followers only”. The Twitter privacy policy (https://twitter.com/privacy) – which are part of the terms of service which every user agrees to when he signs up for an account – are VERY clear in this:

“Our Services are primarily designed to help you share information with the world. Most of the information you provide to us is information you are asking us to make public. This includes not only the messages you Tweet and the metadata provided with Tweets, such as when you Tweeted, but also the lists you create, the people you follow, the Tweets you mark as favorites or Retweet and many other bits of information. Our default is almost always to make the information you provide public but we generally give you settings to make the information more private if you want. Your public information is broadly and instantly disseminated. For example, your public Tweets are searchable by many search engines and are immediately delivered via SMS and our APIs to a wide range of users and services. You should be careful about all information that will be made public by Twitter, not just your Tweets.
Tip What you say on Twitter may be viewed all around the world instantly.”

I didn’t count how often the word public appears in this excerpt from the privacy statement. I wonder if any of the “researchers” who suggests otherwise has ever tweeted. You tweet because you want to get your message out, and not only to our friends (ever heard of retweets?).
This is VERY different from discussion boards, chat rooms, or even Facebook.

And yes – content analysis of tweets and aggregating/mining them on a large scale is already happening.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0014118

That’s what the Twitter APIs are made for.

By: Eli

Eli — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 22:50:25 +0000

Funny, as I’m reading this while wearing my Internet Archive cap (literally!).

My first internal response to the news was, “Wow ….” but I am a former IA geek and care deeply about digital preservation

My second was “How will Twitter users react?”

And my response upon reading your questions was, “How different is this from what IA does with crawling and preserving the web?”

At first glance, there seems to be similarities:
1) Only public tweets will be accessed – similar to IA respecting robots.txt in crawling
2) IA’s crawls were only open to scholars in the beginning
3) 6 month embargo for tweets mirrors the 6-month embargo for making crawls of news websites available
4) While people may have/should have known that their websites were public, unless behind some sort of access wall, they may not have contemplated that their sites would be crawled and archived by others to be viewed for years after they were created; likewise with tweets. Perhaps “constructive notice” of preservation can be more strongly construed against Twitter users, since things like Google cache and IA didn’t exist at the start of the web?

Do you see differences between archiving/preserving Tweets versus websites? I have to admit, the privacy advocate in me is a bit torn, but the IA/Long Now Foundation supporter in me is cheering.

By: Boz

Boz — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 12:51:08 +0000

Hilarious to see the reactionaries in this thread, opposed to technological and practice innovation that might provide privacy in public. The notion that this is hard to do is, well, funny. It’s sad to see them try to rule certain points out of bounds, but that I guess that goes with the reactionary mindset.

By: Jeff Cooper

Jeff Cooper — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 11:55:00 +0000

“Like above, the issue isn’t about having individual tweets reposted, but whether it is ethical for researchers to systematically follow and scrape them, without undergoing IRB review or gaining informed consent.”

Michael, would you consider the DHHS regulations regarding the protection of human subjects in reserach (45 CFR 46) to be an adequate standard to follow in the above statement?