Communications of the ACM
As Data Overflows Online, Researchers Grapple With Ethics
Cornell Professor Jeffrey Hancock said researchers didn't realize that manipulating the content of a news feed would upset some people.
Credit: The New York Times
Researchers are excited about using personal data collected by various social media websites to transform social science research. However, many also say there needs to be ethical guidelines in place for these types of studies. Cornell University professor Jeffrey T. Hancock is developing such guidelines by leading a series of discussions among academics, corporate researchers, and government agencies. "This is a giant societal conversation that needs to take place," Hancock says. Meanwhile, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University are planning panels and conferences on the topic, and several academic journals are working on special issues focusing on ethics.
Microsoft Research is offering a software tool to help scholars quickly survey consumers about the ethics of a project in its early stages. Although existing federal rules governing research on human subjects generally require consent from those studied unless the potential for harm is minimal, the rules never anticipated large-scale research on Internet users and provide inadequate guidance for it, according to many social science scholars.
Too often, researchers conducting digital experiments work in isolation with little outside guidance, according to Indiana University professor Mary L. Gray. Gray and a team of Microsoft researchers spent the last two years developing an ethics advisory committee and training program for researchers in the company's labs who are working with human subjects.
From The New York Times
View Full Article
Abstracts Copyright © 2014 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
No entries found