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Harvard's Privacy Meltdown

Posted by timothy on from the that-cat-is-out-of-the-bag-and-has-a-degree dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A team of Harvard researchers has been accused of breaching students' privacy in a project that involved downloading information from some 1,700 Facebook profiles. The case shines a light on emerging ethical challenges faced by academics researching social networks and other online environments."

4 of 84 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Facebook privacy? by ceoyoyo · · Score: 4, Informative

    Human research labours under very strict ethical requirements. Animal research as well. Sociologists get off easy, but apparently some people decided they shouldn't get off quite THAT easily.

  2. Re:Public or private data? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Deep within TFA:

    But here's where things get sketchy. Mr. Kaufman apparently used Harvard students as research assistants to download the data. That's important, because they had access to profiles that students might have set to be visible to Harvard's Facebook network but not to the whole world

    So, probably a mix of world-public and Harvard-network-public. Friend-public data wouldn't have been included.

  3. Re:Public or private data? by ohnocitizen · · Score: 5, Informative
    Its the latter:

    But here's where things get sketchy. Mr. Kaufman apparently used Harvard students as research assistants to download the data. That's important, because they had access to profiles that students might have set to be visible to Harvard's Facebook network but not to the whole world, Mr. Zimmer argues in a 2010 paper about the case published in Ethics and Information Technology. The assistants' potentially privileged access "should have triggered an ethical concern over whether each student truly intended to have their profile data publicly visible and accessible for downloading," Mr. Zimmer says in an e-mail.

    So students who might have posted photos, updates, notes, political commentary, expecting it to be shown only to friends, friends of friends, or people in their network, might suddenly find ALL of that data, plus extrapolations about what it says about them, displayed publicly.

    Sounds like a clear cut privacy violation, they were right to pull the data.

  4. human research standards by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    As a trained researcher, here's a quick overview of the research and the relevant restrictions: Publicly posted information is available for research. This data set was problematic from the beginning, as it dated from the Harvard student body in the early days of Facebook, and includes data which was only visible to other Harvard students. The research was conducted by using other Harvard students to download the data, then make it available to researchers. The Review Board should probably have turned down the research proposal at the beginning. The board apparently only insisted on "anonymizing" the data so the students and their college couldn't be identified. The data was anonymized, but it has been publicly proven that private information can be derived from the information that was released. I hope this helps.