Forbes privacy columnist Kashmir Hill recently published a profile of University of Texas-Dallas developmental psychology professor Marion Underwood‘s large-scale research project titled “The Blackberry Project.”
The Blackberry Project (formerly known as the Friendship Project) is an ongoing longitudinal study examining teen behavior and sociability, which first recruited its subjects in 2003 (starting with 281 third and fourth graders from 13 Dallas public schools) and relied on yearly laboratory and home observation and surveys for data collection. Then, in 2009, the subjects (now entering 8th grade) were provided with BlackBerry devices with unlimited text and data plans paid for by the investigators. The devices were configured so that the content of all text messages, e-mail messages, and instant messages was saved to a secure server to be mined by the researchers — over 500,000 messages a month are being archived. Preliminary analyses have been published in Developmental Psychology.
The result? Hill puts it best in her headline and opening thoughts:
For the past four years, the University of Texas-Dallas developmental psychology professor has essentially wire-tapped 175 Texas teens, capturing every text message, email, photo, and IM sent on Blackberries that she provided to them, creating a rich database that now contains millions of funny, explicit, sexual, and inane messages for academic study. Half a million new messages pour into the database every month. This summer, she’s adding Facebook content to the mix as well. The teens sacrificed their privacy for science… and a free smartphone, data plan and unlimited text messaging.
Dr. Underwood’s study has been approved by UT-Dallas’s Institutional Review Board, and she’s also received a Certificate of Confidentiality from the NIH, which are only granted after considerable scrutiny. Each participant is given a unique identification number so that all information that is collected is, according to the project website, “de-personalized”. The research data is stored securely with the help of Ceryx and Global Relay, data security providers who typically work together to store and archive electronic communication data for financial institutions. The archive is password protected and can only be accessed by a small group of selected researchers.
In short, this large-scale and long-term project has undergone considerable review, and appears to be taking privacy and security quite seriously. That said, there remain certain ethical concerns about the research worth discussing.
(Note: my discussion is based on what I can glean from available reports and documents about the study; I’m trying to gather additional information through various channels.)
Consent
Since the Blackberry Project (and its predecessor) focus on studying the activity of minors, gaining informed consent is of particular importance. Participants and parents were required to sign detailed consent forms annual that clearly stated that all electronic communication were be recorded and monitored. (While the consent forms for the earlier Friendship Project are available online, I haven’t been able to locate the consent documents for the Blackberry Project. I’ll request them from Dr. Underwood.) It appears this consent process was repeated annually, which is particularly important as subjects grow and develop, and the content of their text and email messages might change over time (for example, 10th graders might start texting about dangerous or legal activity, which might not have been contemplated when original consent was provided years earlier).
Parental consent for minor subjects is standard procedure. However, I wonder how well a parent actually understands the extent to which adolescents make use of mobile texting, and whether a parent really is equipped to represent (and waive) the privacy interests of their adolescent kids if they fail to recognize both the scale and types of information contained within those text messages. Is parental consent really sufficient when we’re dealing with teenager’s use of social media and personal technology? This is something I’ll need to think about more….
Further, any consent granted only involves the participants themselves and their outgoing messages. But those sending messages to the participants have not consented to having their messages stored and subjected to analysis. Underwood recognizes this problem, but argues it away:
Pioneering researchers studying online communication have argued that electronic communication can be observed without permission in some contexts because the information need not be uniquely identifiable, unless individuals have chosen to make their online user name their actual name (see Subrahmanyam et al., 2006; Whitlock, Powers, & Eckenrode, 2006). In our study, although we did have access to participants’ phone contacts and could see how they labeled individuals there, these were rarely uniquely identifiable, because most adolescents chose to label contacts with first names only or with nicknames.
However, I find this argument a bit thin. Just because some “pioneering researchers” claim it is acceptable to study online messages observed without permission “in some contexts” doesn’t make it necessarily ethical here. Hopefully the IRB pressed hard on this issue.
Undue Influence
Consent is only valid if it doesn’t involve coercion or undue influence. While paying research subjects is commonplace and generally acceptable, the fact that subjects in the Blackberry Project received a free smartphone with fully paid data and texting plans (and a generous 300 minute voice plan) might quality as undue influence. The Office of Human Research Protections defines undue influence when researchers offer an “excessive or inappropriate reward or other overture in order to obtain compliance.” OHRP also notes that “The level of remuneration should not be so high as to cause a prospective subject to accept risks that he or she would not accept in the absence of the remuneration.”
This is where the free Blackberries and service plans might be problematic. Since 11% of the participating families had incomes under $25,000, and 29% under $50,000, the allure of a free, “highly attractive” smartphone, complete with a free and unlimited data plan, might have persuaded some lower-income families to participate who otherwise might have considered the project too risky. If you’re on a tight budget, and your kids keep pestering you for a smartphone, the Blackberry Project might have been a lifesaver, regardless of the risks.
Determining undue influence is a grey area, and, again, I hope that UT-Dallas’s IRB considered this matter with vigor.
Privacy and Anonymity
Underwood has taken great lengths to protect subject privacy, including the use of secure, off-campus data storage platforms and replacing account names with ID numbers within the archive. Yet, considerable privacy concerns remain. There are plenty of cases where simply replacing names with ID numbers fails to provide sufficient anonymity, and the content of the messages themselves might reveal various personal details of the participants and their friends. The researchers indicate they use the participants address books to help “replace phone numbers with whatever the participants used to label their contacts” when compiling transcripts. While some of these labels might be un-identifiable, others might effectively “out” particular people within the dataset.
The Forbes article also notes:
Underwood has gotten calls from investigators around the country who would love access to her database, but she says she doesn’t want to hand over the data unless she can de-identify it or anonymize it. I’m imagining many a privacy scholar shaking his or her head in dismay given how difficult true anonymization is.
Indeed. I’m curious to know what steps toward deidentification or anonymization Underwood intends before sharing the data.
The Forbes piece presses Underwood further about the issue of privacy:
When I asked Underwood if any of the kids (or their parents) had ever expressed concern about the privacy of their communications, and the discomfort they might feel about every single thing they send being archived indefinitely for study, she said it had been a “non-issue.”
“We haven’t really directly asked about it. We don’t do anything to draw attention to our monitoring,” says Underwood. She prefers that teenagers act naturally. Asking them too strongly about how they feel about their privacy might negatively affect the “observing them in the wild” aspect of her study.
This troubles me. Here, a researcher collecting millions of personal messages sent between teens admits to not wanting to directly address privacy with the subjects because it might negatively affect the study. If you bring up the privacy concern, Underwood seems to say, it will just cause them to self-censor. Of course, if her hypothesis is true, that validates the privacy concern itself — the participants might actually care about their privacy, once reminded about it. (Note to researchers: if you find yourself wanting to minimize disclosure of privacy concerns, then you have significant privacy concerns that need to be addressed.)
In sum, the Blackberry Project appears to have been managed properly through the IRB rules and regulations. These open issues speak more to the nature of this kind of research generally, versus about this project specifically. I’m very curious as to how the researchers and the IRB discussed and deliberated these issues, and will provide any updates if I’m able to gain access to more details.
MichaelZimmer.org 
A good walk-through of the issues (think I will even suggest that it could be used as a case study for the latest AoIR ethics document). My only reservation would be your assertion that if people when prompted are concerned about their privacy that this is indistinguishable from unprompted privacy concern. There’s lots of evidence that people will get worried about lots of things once they are prompted to do so, even if “objectively” they needn’t be worried. Imagine, for example, taking people who had no notion that mobile phone radiation could be dangerous to health and telling them “many scientific studies have concluded that there is no connection between mobile phone radiation and health risks. Are you concerned about such risks?” I’ll bet you you would start to get some yeses.
This article is very interesting in raising the question of how the research is being performed in obtaining the different text messages that teen typical send through their smartphone. Now the researcher is taken a level of responsibility in informing and re-informing parents of these teenagers that their messages are being used and monitor for research purposes only. The ethical concerns about how this information can be used and stored can be justified to some degree of relevance to what law-enforcement agencies use for their investigations.
Now, law-enforcement agencies can establish court orders to have certain phone and text messages to be examined during an investigation. All phone companies and even social networks like Facebook keep records of what people post and the contents of the information. Now I believe this is a special case where investigations of say fraud and murder used to show proof through evidence that could be implicated on the accused for committing a crime. However, this element of information can only play a certain part in the investigation process.
With this research, maybe the most concerning part is that adolescent individuals are being used in the research and though parents are made aware of the research that is being conducted and reminded that the research is being performed, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the teenagers and the parents are fully aware of the extent of the text messages are taken account in the research process. Sometimes, as many electronic users typically will do, they will just click on the yes I agree or quickly do a skim read on the document and sign their name so they can get the opportunity to use their products as soon as possible. Even with the annual reminders of the Smartphone project, there will always be parents who will “quickly dismissed or accept” the agreements and terms for the contract. Though it is more likely to agree since there are so many extra features and deals thrown in to keep the family parties happy.
The good news is that the researcher demonstrates a level of concern and wanting to preserve privacy and Anonymity of the information. She even doesn’t hand the information over until the information has been undergone some level of de-personalization…. At the very least, the researcher is trying to help preserve privacy for the participants.
Is it enough? That’s debatable. More probably could be done. There is always the savvy hacker that wants information so even random id number generation and nicknames and passwords can always be breached by the most persistent “information gatherer.” Though I think it is good to show our concerns and ask the hard questions of motive, reason, and objective for this particular research. In effect, we, the people, are demonstrating our responsibility to promote responsible parenting and hopefully responsible teenagers that are informed that their texts are stored and that whatever they text can always be unintentionally be traced and even used against them in the future. In a sense, we all learn ourselves to be more responsible for our actions in creating and sending texts and show our concern how our information is used and for what purpose. The monitoring of a parent/individual never ends and awareness and vigilance should always be constant.