The Ethics of Internet Research

Rebecca Eynon, Jenny Fry and Ralph Schroeder

Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxfordwww.oii.ox.ac.uk

New technology, old and new ethics

• Ethical governance in traditional research settings

• What’s new?• Sensitivity to context

• Approaches to Internet research– Gathering data directly from individuals– Analyzing Interaction in Virtual Environments– Internet as a Social Science Lab

Gathering data directly from individuals

• Focus on survey, interviews and focus groups– Benefits and risks– Ensuring confidentiality– Informed consent

• A balancing act – Protected but not burdened

Benefits and risks

• Protection of harm online– More difficult to assess the risks and benefits online– More of an issue for interviews and focus groups than

surveys?

• Strategies– Make it clear participants can leave– Prior rapport with participant– Establishing netiquette

• Protection of harm - researchers & participants

Ensuring anonymity and confidentiality

• Perceived anonymity of the Internet

• Considerations when– Transmitting data– Storing data– Interacting with participants

• Difficulties of direct email contact– FAQs

– Rewards for participating

Informed consent

• Difficult in any context but often more so online– Distance between researcher & participant– Challenges anonymity strategies

• Strategies– Email discussion– Readability of documents– Using quizzes to check understanding

• Verifying ability to give informed consent– Recruitment strategy– Verifying identity – e.g. via a credit card

Analyzing Interaction in Virtual Environments

• Focus on graphical online spaces with avatar interaction

• Differences in text-only versus voice communication, video- versus virtual, etc.

• Contexts of use include online gaming, spaces for socializing and collaborating, training online for offline tasks, experimenting in virtual

Research on VEs: Contexts and the role of the Researcher

• Contact people offline? – Weigh burden on research participant

• The online social setting: formally public, but respect the conventions for the privacy of the space? – Be sensitive to context

• Disclose researcher identity? – Online possibilities are different from offline (ID tag)

• ‘Invasion’ of researchers– Respect social milieu

Research on VEs: Data Capture

• Tools for capture are more powerful than for capturing offline interactions

• Anonymous data about populations, but surveillance?

• Reproducing and anonymizing captured interactions, but possible identification by search?

Research in Online Worlds

• Maintaining the trust of environments and avatars and the persons ‘behind them’

• New possibilities for the study of social interaction in online worlds and VEs – Virtual Milgram as example

• A balance of deontological and utilitarian research ethics

Large-scale analysis of online domains

• The Internet as a social science laboratory

• Capacity to capture traces of social interaction on a global scale

• Creation of data sets and visualization tools that enable previously invisible social structures to be rendered visible

• Raises unique set of ethical issues

Private spaces in public places

• Online forum open to the public: ‘forbidden love’ and ‘the art of forbidden love’(Example thanks to Gustavo Mesch)

• Participants assume a role, use of nicknames, keeping places of work and home private

• Need an email address and password to contribute; if not a member you can read postings

• Active contributors @50 people, readership much larger; ability to have private one-to-one messages

• A kind of support group; meet every 2-3 months in a café etc.

• Issues of privacy and anonymity very important to the group

Researcher dilemma

• All stories are public; archived for past two years; a lot of data

• Contributors do not have a sense of public, they are part of a group; conflict with the concept of ‘open’

• What O’Riordan and Bassett (2002) term ‘nested utopic’ spaces

• This perception relates directly to content analysis; but • There are structural issues relating to:

– culture, values, role of the community, who sustains it, what is the interaction?

• What would be harm in this context? Does not involve direct human intervention, so little formal guidance

• Who has right to structural information?

Contextual integrity

• Closely related to personal perceptions of privacy

• New contexts may necessitate different privacy protections

• Status and interests in data may change over time

• More difficult to gauge what is ethically appropriate

• Privacy online closely related to how the Internet is governed

Conclusions• Challenges in devising a code of practice in a global context• Necessity to represent and incorporate diverse

– Disciplines– research methods– cultural practices– institutional governance and;– legal frameworks

• Research object no longer clearly delineated and protected by national boundaries

• Convergence of commercial and research interests due to ease of re-use

• Data are more likely to be reconceptualised in new settings by new actors

• Is there a boundary to be respected between the online and offline worlds of online social actors?

• To what extent should we protect from harm for unforeseen consequences?