The ethical dimensions of Internet-based research tools and methods, and impacts on privacy, consent, and harm.
For the last 353 days, I've been part of a team planning Internet Research 10.0 – Internet: Critical, the 10th annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR). My life is about to get back to normal, as an…
Read More IR.10 Internet: Critical (or, why the blog has been slow lately)
Congratulations to Elizabeth Buchanan and Charles Ess for being awarded an NSF grant to create a much-needed repository and advisory board to address the challenges that emerging Internet and Web 2.0 platforms are placing on research ethics. I'm thrilled to…
I've returned from the 8th International Conference of Computer Ethics: Philosophical Enquiry in Corfu, Greece, where I presented an early draft of a paper based on my critique of the “Taste, Ties, and Time” Facebook data release. The paper was…
Read More Debrief: Computer Ethics/Philosophical Enquiry 2009 in Corfu, Greece
[UPDATE: The final paper has been published in Ethics and Information Technology]Next week I will be attending the 8th International Conference of Computer Ethics: Philosophical Enquiry in Corfu, Greece, where I will be presenting an early draft of a paper…
Read More Draft Paper: “But the Data is Already Public”: On the Ethics of Research in Facebook
One of my students pointed me to this post noting that Sony Online Entertainment has provided 4 years of server log data for their online game EverQuest 2 to researchers. From the Ars Technica story: With the cooperation of Sony,…
Read More Sony Provides Complete Everquest 2 Server Logs to Researchers
Information is leverage. Information is power. Information is Maltego. These are the catch-phrases for a South African company that recently released an affordable, user-friendly data mining tool called Maltego, bringing powerful data-mining technology to the masses. While targeted mostly to…
I was recently asked by the campus newspaper to comment on a new Facebook application called CampusBuddy. Utilizing grading records from 250 public colleges and universities nationwide (public schools generally are legally obligated to release their grades upon request), CampusBuddy…
Read More CampusBuddy: Aggregating Campus Grading Data on Facebook
(See my update at the bottom of the post, as well as Fred Stutzman's thoughtful analysis) As mentioned the other day, a group of researchers from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University released a dataset of…
Read More More On the “Anonymity” of the Facebook Dataset – It’s Harvard College (Updated)
(Updated below with responses to comments by Jason Kaufman, one of the lead researchers on this project) (Another update: I'm pretty sure the "anonymous, Northeastern university" from where this dataset was derived is Harvard College. Details here) A group of…
Read More On the “Anonymity” of the Facebook Dataset (Updated)
CNET reports that the University of California at Berkeley is creating an interdisciplinary center for advanced search technologies in search of creating the "ultimate search tool" and to "address the explosive growth of Internet search and the complex issues that…
MichaelZimmer.org 
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