Michael Zimmer, PhD, is a digital privacy and data ethics scholar at Marquette University
I'm currently in Phoenix, AZ for the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, participating on an important panel on "Researching Social Media: Ethical and Methodological Challenges", organized by Anders Olof Larsson (Uppsala) and Hallvard Moe (Bergen). The panel is…
Read More ICA 2012: Researching Social Media: Ethical and Methodological Challenges
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 is an ongoing longitudinal study examining teen behavior and sociability, which first recruited its subjects in 2003. 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. While the Blackberry Project appears to have been managed properly through the IRB rules and regulations, it highlights emerging ethical concerns with projects of this nature, including issues of consent, undue influence, and privacy & anonymity.
This weekend I have the great privilege of sharing my research and perspectives on Internet research ethics at the 2011 "Advancing Ethical Research" conference held by Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research (PRIM&R). On the opening morning of the conference,…
Read More Presentations at PRIM&R 2011 “Adancing Ethical Research”
The Chronicle of Higher Education has published an article featuring my critique of the privacy protections and research methods related to the “Taste, Ties, and Time” (T3) Facebook research study conducted by a set of Harvard sociologists. Written by Marc…
Recently, a Facebook dataset was released consisting of the complete set of users from the Facebook networks at 100 American institutions, and all of the in-network “friendship” links between those users as they existed at a single moment of time in September 2005. Surprisingly, it initially included each users unique Facebook ID, meaning the presumed "anonymous" dataset could be easily re-identified, potentially putting the personal information of 1.2 million Facebook users at risk.
Last week I attended Internet Research 11.0: Sustainability, Participation, Action, the 11th annual conference for the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), in Gothenburg, Sweden. This is the conference I look forward to the most each year, thanks to the steady…
Read More Debrief: Internet Research 11.0 Conference (Gothenburg, Sweden)
On Wednesday, July 21, 2010, I will be presenting in front of the Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections (SACHRP), part of the Office for Human Research Protections in the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). My presentation will focus on how Web 2.0 tools, environments, and experiences are creating new conceptual gaps in our understanding of privacy, anonymity/identifiability, consent, and harm.
Recently I've found myself absorbed in various issues surrounding Internet research ethics: the Tastes, Ties, and Time Facebook data release, Pete Warden's plans to release a database of public Facebook information on 215 million users, etc. To help work through…
Speaking of the research ethics related to automatically harvesting public social networking data, we are confronted this week with the story of Pete Warden, a former Apple engineer who has spent the last six months harvesting and analyzing data from…
Read More Why Pete Warden Should Not Release Profile Data on 215 Million Facebook Users
While participating in the workshop on Revisiting Research Ethics in the Facebook Era: Challenges in Emerging CSCW Research, the question arose as to whether it was ethical for researchers to follow and systematically capture public Twitter streams without first obtaining…
Read More Is it Ethical to Harvest Public Twitter Accounts without Consent?
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