Harvard's Privacy Meltdown

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."

Comments

Isn't this how Facebook started?

[Chrysocolla]

Maybe one day, they will have a movie about themselves.

Facebook privacy?

[SEWilco]

So privacy was violated by reading what the students chose to publish on Facebook? Just think of all the privacy violations the students do when they read the college course descriptions!

Re:Facebook privacy?

[ceoyoyo]

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.

Public or private data?

[pushing-robot]

The article fails to mention whether this information from FB profiles was shared or private.

If it's the latter, the crime lies with the person who gave the researchers free access to it in the first place.

If it's the former, I'm off to violate thousands of people's privacy by reading my phone book's white pages.

Re:Public or private data?

[ohnocitizen]

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.

Re:Public or private data?

[pushing-robot]

Thanks for finding that; I had skimmed the article and searched it for some keywords but apparently missed that section.

Still, IMHO giving 40,000 students, faculty and staff access to a piece of information should count as "displaying it publicly".

It's as if I put a billboard on campus; then, when a photo of it started circulating on the Internet, I claimed that my privacy was being violated—the billboard was intended to be viewed by Harvard students, faculty, staff, visitors, random people walking aimlessly by, and squirrels...but NO ONE ELSE!

This was already approved

[lavagolemking]

But Mr. Kaufman talks openly about another controversial piece of his data gathering: Students were not informed of it. He discussed this with the institutional review board. Alerting students risked "frightening people unnecessarily," he says.

Basically, the IRB (also sometimes referred to as "ethics review committee") signed off on this. Now, once he's about to publish the results, they pull the plug.

Putting aside the university's hypocrisy (believe me, I can think of far worse privacy breaches), give me one good reason why collecting this kind of aggregate, anonymized data is ok for an advertiser who is studying how to most effectively manipulate people into buying something and generally won't even let people opt out of tracking, but it's not ok for a sociologist to publish aggregate statistical data from mined Facebook profiles. Advertisers are a lot less ethical about it than academic researchers.

Re:This was already approved

[calmofthestorm]

> give me one good reason why
> Advertisers are a lot less ethical about it than academic researchers.
You answered your own question.

The difference is that we hold ourselves to a higher standard. The IRB tradition comes in the wake of shockingly immoral research conducted by scientists who didn't see anything wrong with it (Milgram's "just following orders" torture experiment, baby Albert's conditioning, etc). The lesson here is that scientists cannot be trusted to judge the ethical implications of their own experiments, which is why we have the IRB, even for cases that seem to researchers to be perfectly reasonable (just giving a multiple-choice survey)

You are, however, correct that if IRB approval was sought and given, the mistake was theirs. If he used research assistants' facebook accounts to glean the data, as is alleged, there's no way that should have passed IRB.

human research standards

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:You put your stuff out in plain view

[lucm]

Sound argument. Just like: "you have an easy PIN on your debit card, why are you surprised someone stole your money" or "you were wearing a short skirt at the office, why expect your boss will not harass you".

It is important to refuse unacceptable behavior even if no sufficient safeguards are in place, so the people and organizations learn what they can and can't do. It's like seeing someone slapping his/her kid in a restaurant - if you complain they may snap back at you and tell you to mind your own business, but the impact of a stranger telling them that what they do is wrong is very likely to prevent them from doing it again. This is part of the social contract.

What they did in this case was wrong, and it's a good thing to make a fuss about it and not let people think that privacy is only something that takes place in a doctor's office.