![]() The…research project might very well be ushering in “a new way of doing social science,” but it is our responsibility as scholars to ensure our research methods and processes remain rooted in long-standing ethical practices. In my critique of the Harvard Facebook study from 2010, I warned: There are serious ethical issues that big data scientists must be willing to address head on-and head on early enough in the research to avoid unintentionally hurting people caught up in the data dragnet. And it appears Kirkegaard, at least for the time being, has removed the OkCupid data from his open repository. Peter Warden ultimately destroyed his data. The Harvard “Tastes, Ties, and Time” dataset is no longer publicly accessible. Rather, we should highlight this episode as one among the growing list of big data research projects that rely on some notion of “public” social media data, yet ultimately fail to stand up to ethical scrutiny. My goal here is not to disparage any scientists. I suppose I am one of those “social justice warriors” he's talking about. Not to fan the flames on the social justice warriors.” Numerous posts interrogating the ethical dimensions of the research methodology have been removed from the open peer-review forum for the draft article, since they constitute, in Kirkegaard’s eyes, “non-scientific discussion.” (It should be noted that Kirkegaard is one of the authors of the article and the moderator of the forum intended to provide open peer-review of the research.) When contacted by Motherboard for comment, Kirkegaard was dismissive, stating he “would like to wait until the heat has declined a bit before doing any interviews. ![]() While he replied, so far he has refused to answer my questions or engage in a meaningful discussion (he is currently at a conference in London). I contacted Kirkegaard with a set of questions to clarify the methods used to gather this dataset, since internet research ethics is my area of study. The “publicness” of social media activity is also used to explain why we should not be overly concerned that the Library of Congress intends to archive and make available all public Twitter activity. And it appeared again in 2010, when Pete Warden, a former Apple engineer, exploited a flaw in Facebook’s architecture to amass a database of names, fan pages, and lists of friends for 215 million public Facebook accounts, and announced plans to make his database of over 100 GB of user data publicly available for further academic research. The “already public” excuse was used in 2008, when Harvard researchers released the first wave of their “Tastes, Ties and Time” dataset comprising four years’ worth of complete Facebook profile data harvested from the accounts of cohort of 1,700 college students. He is an Associate Professor in the School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and Director of the Center for Information Policy Research. ![]() Michael Zimmer, PhD, is a privacy and Internet ethics scholar.
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