orgtheory.net

Via Jenn, Michael Zimmer engages in a discussion with sociologist Jason Kaufman about the privacy issues involved with collecting and using Facebook data. Jason’s study examines a cohort of students at “an anonymous, northeastern American university,” using Facebook data to assess changes in the students’ tastes and associations.  The research idea is very cool given that there are so few good data on changes in either networks or cultural preferences.  The coolness of the study is augmented because one can presumably see how the two coevolve.

Zimmer, though, takes issue with the manner in which the data were collected and will eventually be released to the general public.  Although the researchers take great pains to hide (and later destroy) any identifying information, Zimmer maintains that the users’ privacy is nonetheless compromised.  First, it is easy to identify the institution as Harvard.  Second, even with identifying information deleted, demographic features may make certain individuals stand out anyway.

The fact that the dataset includes each subjects’ gender, race, ethnicity, hometown state, and major makes it increasingly possibility that individuals could be identified. For example, if the data reveals that student #746 is a white Bulgarian male from Montana, majoring in East Asian Studies, there probably aren’t that many who fit such a description.

Also a problem, Zimmer argues, is that cultural tastes alone could identify people, given that the more unique someone’s tastes are, the more they will stand out among their peers.  Jason and his colleagues are not releasing the data until 2011 (and until then the data are stored on a local, secure server) but Zimmer thinks that this time lag isn’t long enough. But what really seems to bug Zimmer is a more humanistic concern that the data collection procedure was in some way unethical.

[J]ust because users post information on Facebook doesn’t mean they intend for it to be scraped, aggregated, coded, disected, and distributed. Creating a Facebook account and posting information on the social networking site is a decision made with the intent to engage in a social community, to connect with people, share ideas and thoughts, communicate, be human. Just because some of the profile information is publicly avaiable (either consciously by the user, or due to a failure to adjust the default privacy settings), doesn’t mean there are no expectations of privacy with the data. This is contextual integrity 101.

Jason defends the data collection and usage procedures in the comments section by arguing that their study was painstakingly reviewed and approved by a stringent IRB process. He also defends the ethics of the process.

Would you require that someone sitting in a public square, observing individuals and taking notes on their behavior, would have to ask those individuals’ consent in advance? We have not accessed any information not otherwise available on Facebook. We have not interviewed anyone, nor asked them for any information, nor made information about them public (unless, as you all point out, someone goes to the extreme effort of cracking our dataset, which we hope it will be hard to do).

I sympathize greatly with Jason and think that the likelihood of someone cracking the code and using this information harmfully is extremely low.  At some point the research community has to compare the likelihood of a data collection process causing harm to individuals with the benefits associated with advancing scientific knowledge.  In this case, I think Jason and his colleagues are on the right side.  However, reading Zimmer’s thoughts made me think twice about the ways in which we deal with privacy issues. It’s not uncommon to read an organizational study in which the organization itself is easily identifiable.  All one has to do to find the organization in many case studies is a simple google search of quotations found in the paper and the real name of the company quickly shows up.  Is this a problem? Again, I don’t worry about it too much because I think the upsides greatly outweigh the downsides, but I do respect Zimmer for taking the privacy issue seriously.

The ethical question seems to me to be more complicated but, again, I’ll side with Jason on this.  According to the standards of ethical research put forward by Zimmer, most ethnographies and historical research would be off-limits (did the deceased person in question intend her words to be broadcast publicly when she wrote her thoughts in a journal entry?).  People live with the risk all the time that their actions are observable and that inferences could be made based on those observations. That doesn’t stop people from waking up and walking out of their houses in the morning.  Living in public space is, I think, giving permission to the larger world to observe and record your actions.  It only becomes harmful, from a researcher’s standpoint, when those actions could be used to take advantage of the person or to expose that person to greater risks (e.g., possible physical injury) than simple public exposure.