Internert users are masking their identities
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height=225>A Pew Internet and American Life study released last week showed
that 86 percent of Internet users have made steps to remove or mask their
identities online. Meanwhile, some companies are even trying to be open about
their activities: Acxiom Corp., which collects and sells data about individuals
to companies, just launched Aboutthedata.com, a site where Internet users can
see and manage what Acxiom knows about them.
Generally speaking, fields such as statistics, computer science and the hard
sciences dont teach ethics. There are privacy concerns, such as how much
corporations and the government should know about individuals
. But software
engineers are taught about the elegance or the mathematical beauty of the thing
that theyre building, not how it will affect peoples lives.
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A computer science professor at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, says that she teaches her students how to sample data
ethically and protect subjects in academic studies. For example, in a Facebook
study, the researcher should replace all the participants names, all their
friends names and all their friends of friends names with numbers.
If you do these large social network studies, you dont have what they call
participant-informed consent. Lets say I have you in one of my Facebook
studies, and youre coming to my lab and we are analyzing the strength of the
connections between you and your friends. Im getting information about your
friends and their friends without their consent. Its a very, very ethically
sensitive area.
Many ethics guidelines come from the Belmont Report, created in 1978 to
protect human research subjects. It requires universities that receive funding
from the government to have whats called an Institute Review Board perform an
ethics review of proposed studies involving human subjects.
If academics find that big data allows them to obtain more information than
they would be able to gather when dealing with subjects in person, imagine what
companies like Google and Facebook know. They are forming their own policies,
which tend to be that you pay for a service, particularly a free service, by
giving up some privacy. The fact people are so used to this may be why, after
the initial shock over the NSA news, many people effectively shrugged. According
to a Washington Post-ABC poll in late July, 58 percent said they support this
intelligence gathering in the effort to identify potential terrorists, compared
to 39 percent opposed.
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