Slashdot Mirror
UT Dallas Professor Captures the Mobile Interactions of 175 Texas Teens
nonprofiteer writes "A University of Texas-Dallas developmental psychology professor has used a $3.4 million NIH grant to purchase Blackberries for 175 Texas teens, capturing every text message, email, photo, and IM they've sent over the past 4 years.Half a million new messages pour into the database every month. The researchers don't 'directly ask' the teens about privacy issues because they don't want to remind them they're being monitored. So many legal and ethical issues here. I can't believe this is IRB-approved. Teens sending nude photos alone could make that database legally toxic. And then there's the ethical issue of monitoring those who have not consented to be part of the study, but are friends with those who have. When a friend texted one participant about selling drugs, he responded, 'Hey, be careful, the BlackBerry people are watching, but don't worry, they won't tell anyone.'"
This sounds like an American version of the "Seven Up" series.
Also, with the help of a calculator, I got 98 messages per day per teen. That's like what I send in a busy year.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
US Government response to their measly $3.4 million dollar program monitoring a tiny fraction of the entire country, as they fire up their $3.4 trillion dollar system...
"Amateurs. You call THAT monitoring? Please..."
It's really amazing the things that can be built when someone else is paying for it...
Grant money also goes to help paying salaries, student tuition, equipment, and additional workers. Don't forget about the money for the database, db administrators/developers, computers, and all the other technical work involved for four years. Also, the school also takes out a large chunk, ours tacks up to 50% extra on top of the subtotal.
:p
You'd be surprised how expensive research can get. Not that I'm justifying that it should be that expensive, just saying there's a lot involved in the budget. Not everybody has access to cheap, available undergrads capable of doing the work.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
Well they're on sprint... So about $70/month for unlimited text and data = 840 per year.
Over the last four years that's $3,360 per teen.
For 175 Teens that's $588,000.
Then you have the monitoring software, the backend database. Half a million messages per month? Over four years that's 24,000,000 messages in an uknown number of tables. You might want to pay a person to make sure that thing stays running and do daily backups to make sure there are no gaps in your data if stuff breaks.
Then you have the army of grad students who are probably funded through that grant who are either sifting through the data themselves, or coding up machine learning applications to draw conclusions from it.
And this research project also existed before they started using blackberries (since 2003). So this $3.4 million seems to have gone a long way.
Abuse how? They know what they're getting into. They received the phones with the express condition of the monitoring. And it requires the parents' consent as well as the children's.
You can be arrested for distributing child pornography if you are in the USA. See Slashdot back stories for a specific example...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I guess that I don't understand people's privacy objections here. Those people who got free BlackBerries are well aware of the monitoring. Legally, either party may record a conversation and save it and provide it to whomever they want (Though this varies by state). It's the responsibility of the BlackBerry owner to make sure that their friends know the situation -- and based on the last drug-text, they do.
The bigger question that should be in a /. poll soon, is: "I would give a researcher all of your phone data, text, and other information, in exchange for a free:
(1) dumb phone
(2) BlackBerry
(3) iPhone
(4) RAZR smart phone
(5) CowboyNeal "
And then there's the ethical issue of monitoring those who have not consented to be part of the study, but are friends with those who have.
That's the same issue that most people already have with texts and emails.
If I text you or email you something, I have no idea if you're going to download that message unto your work cell phone, or your work laptop, and besides even if you do own your own cell phone and your own account, I have no guarantee that you won't forward my texts or my emails to others anyway.
My friend works for that research group. They upgrade the teen's phones every year to the newest "flagship" phone. Keep in mind that the kids opting in to this need a reason to continue with the project. That means a new iPhone2, iPhone 3, iPhone 3S, iphone4, iPhone4s etc. I think most of the kids switched off blackberries a long time ago.
I'm not sure how big the research team is, but there's at least 4 full time non-students in the group. They don't keep an archive of all the data, interestingly. Probably for privacy reasons. They do classify the data in to positive/negative text messages, and identify who in the group are the alphas, betas, etc.
I honestly wouldn't worry about the kid's data privacy/rights, knowing who works in that group, they're all a really good group of people and outstanding citizens overall.
moox. for a new generation.
You do know that R01 grants aren't exactly done on a secret handshake agreement, right? There are so many hoops academic researchers have to jump through to get federal funding. And I say that as someone who almost lost his job the day after landing a big grant, because I accidentally kept someone out of the loop. Your grant proposal gets reviewed by your department people, by the IRB committee, by the university's office of research, and by internal counsel (if needed) BEFORE it ever leaves campus. And then it gets reviewed by program officers, and many impartial and often vicious grant reviewers. And let's not forget that NIH grant success rates in many institutes are approaching 10%, so likely it won't matter at all because you won't get funded.
And, shockingly, the grant description has been available at NIH.gov since at least 2009: "An important innovation of this phase of the longitudinal study will be careful assessment of social aggression in online communication by providing adolescents with handheld devices and recording and coding the content of their text messaging, Instant Messaging, and email communication."
You personally may disagree with the decision that the project is ethical, but you can't argue that they weren't honest with everyone about what they set out to do.
LIkely this went through layers of reviews of what exactly can and can't be done with and to the data, and explicitly spelling out to the people getting the phones just what they've agreed to.
You can't get this kind of data without 'violating' privacy in some way or another (I use quotes because as long as they've spelled out what exactly they're doing it's not technically a violate0. But that's also what makes it valuable research, you can't know what people are actually using the devices for without asking them to fully tell you. That real information about how devices are actually use is tremendously valuable to all sorts of different groups of people, from the technical side of things to the sociology and history people.
From TFA they seemed to have based their data gathering on SEC rules for gathering data on employee communications and use the same technology. Essentially the students are being given cell phones the way your employer would give you one, and monitored and data aggregated accordingly. They are yearly paid 50 bucks for visits, sign yearly consent forms and are fully aware of what exactly is being tracked, which, admittedly, produces certain biases in the data. They know they're being monitored and that data will be stored forever, but they may not be entirely aware of what that means, but I guess that's the tricky balance, the data isn't any good if they don't behave normally, but then they might not behave normally if you for every text message you insert one reminding them this call is all being recorded.
As per TFA "Underwood got a Federal Certificate of Confidentiality from the NIH, exempting the researchers from having to report any discussion of crimes to authorities. But her team is required to monitor the database for talk of suicide or abuse. On a weekly basis, they do a search with a long list of words, including rape, kill myself, or older man. They’ve had to intervene fewer than 5 times, says Underwood."
Now obviously the researcher in question is a bit naive about just what a public dump of the data could reveal, but then you'd never know any of the stuff this data can tell you without being able to get it.
In which case I see no issue.
I see it in the same light as my typing this reply on my work provided notebook over my work provided network connection on my lunch break. My employer is entitled to:
* look at my browser cache
* look at the proxy logs
* instruct the proxy to cache all content to/from my machine on the net
etc.
These phones are no different. The teens were employed by the study, payment was in the form of an unlimited phone for the duration of employment. The only difference in this case is the whole reason for employment in this case was to allow snooping, as opposed to my employment being to surf the web and look for security related stuff, then apply what I see/learn to our latest products as an attack, and document my success/failure with said attacks.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Yep. Won't someone think of the children and protect them from being exploited by... themselves?
Or a $3.4 million grant to study how federal grant money is wasted on useless studies.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Do you spend much time around teens? Although it has added a little, it has replaced a lot. In terms of total time communicating compared to ten years ago, my personal experience is that teens spend far fewer minutes per day talking face to face, even if the overall time spent communicating is greater. The logical conclusion is that the facetime has been replaced moreso than added to.
the 4+ people who work on the project aren't the ones who own the data, the university is.
that's the issue with privacy... we trust the people who we willingly give our privacy up to, but it is the people who come after them that we have to worry about.
So all the kids who take pictures of themselve are pedophiles according to the US laws ?
Yep. What's even better is that they are charged as adults for creating child pornography of themselves.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil