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> And it was a small study by a group of graduate students, which seems unlikely to be subject to as much scrutiny as a study officially funded and endorsed by

> And it was a small study by a group of graduate students, which seems unlikely to be subject to as much scrutiny as a study officially funded and endorsed by the university Whether or not this is what happens in practice, the purview of an IRB in the US very much is supposed to cover this situation. IRBs have intentionally broad mandates and cover quite a lot of things that most people would not immediately recognize as 'research' or 'experiments'. > to raise awareness of the fact that what you put onto the Internet is public. Most technical people consider 'doxxing' to be bad. However, in most cases, 'doxxing' is simply publicizing information that is already part of the public record[0]. There's a difference, based on the barrier to accessing that information. [0] If I know your name and your city/state of residence, it's trivial for me to obtain a copy of your driver's license or voting registration information FOIA/FOIL requests typically charge a nominal processing fee to cover the costs of processing the requests, but only because it's a largely manual process, and the marginal costs of requesting many records at once is very low.

chatmasta 10y ago
(Not disagreeing with you in any way, just want to add onto your points) > IRBs have intentionally broad mandates and cover quite a lot of things that most people would not immediately recognize as 'research' or 'experiments'. And yet, professors routinely assign their students to conduct informal "studies" for class credit (perhaps a final project) or learning experience. These sort of "studies" are rarely, if ever, sent to any kind of IRB, and yet plenty of undergraduates are capable of creating a python scraper to download data from OkCupid. > "There's a difference, based on the barrier to accessing that information" What is "that information" in the case of this OkCupid study, and what is the "barrier," before and after the research was published? If the "information" is, for example, the fact that your spouse is cheating on you, does this research really remove any "barrier" to make it easier to discover than it was before publishing? If I wanted to know if my spouse was cheating on me, I could simply create an OkCupid profile and check the listings in my local town around my spouse's age range. Releasing the data of 60,000 OkCupid accounts, all of which is accessible from simply logging into the website, does not make it any easier for me to find that profile. Also note that this is different from, say, the Ashley Madison hack, where email addresses were released from an internal, private database. The emails were not "public" information before the data dump, and therefore the data dump lowered the "barrier" to searching for a target individual amongst the thousands of members. In this case, it seems the "data dump" did not introduce any new paths of accessing information. Instead it simply mirrored information that already exists and is readily accessible by effectively anyone with a computer.
- chimeracoder 10y ago
  > What is "that information" in the case of this OkCupid study, and what is the "barrier," before and after the research was published? To clarify, I'm contesting this statement: > Perhaps a better use of this soapbox, instead of lambasting the researchers, would be to raise awareness of the fact that what you put onto the Internet is public. on the grounds that, even if we were talking entirely about information that is already 100% 'public', there are ethical concerns with making already-public information more readily accessible (and therefore easier to use for nefarious purposes). Doxxing is an easy example because most people generally agree that it crosses some sort of ethical line, and there are plenty of clear examples where doxxed information has been used for nefarious purposes (ie, to harass, stalk, and/or abuse the victim). In other words, I'm not saying that all of the information in this particular case was already public. I'm saying that focusing on that distinction is a distraction from the underlying issue.
  - chatmasta 10y ago
    Yes, and I'm contesting the statement that this research made any information "more readily accessible." In what way was information inaccessible before the study, and accessible afterward? The only qualifying scenario I can think of is if someone deleted their profile during the study, and it "reappeared" as a result of the study publishing its data.
    - sinxoveretothex 10y ago
      There's a difference between "making more accessible" and "making accessible". The latter means that information that was _inaccessible_ was made accessible (ergo: you couldn't access the information before the event). The former is less constrained: it just means that whatever state of accessibility the information was in, it is now easier to access. As an example: digitizing a book that is available for free to anyone who goes to Public Library One in Big City makes it more accessible (because I can access it from the other side of the world while eating soup) even though it wasn't _inaccessible_ before.
drdaeman 10y ago
> Most technical people consider 'doxxing' to be bad. By the way. I'm genuinely curious - were there any researches on this sort of statistics? If you know of anything like that, would you mind sharing? I suspect (without any basis) that if a different groups to be compared, the fraction among the STEM people could be somewhat lower, relative to others.
EdHominem 10y ago
What's bad is the (usual) calls for unlawful action against the target.

chatmasta 10y ago

(Not disagreeing with you in any way, just want to add onto your points) > IRBs have intentionally broad mandates and cover quite a lot of things that most people would not immediately recognize as 'research' or 'experiments'. And yet, professors routinely assign their students to conduct informal "studies" for class credit (perhaps a final project) or learning experience. These sort of "studies" are rarely, if ever, sent to any kind of IRB, and yet plenty of undergraduates are capable of creating a python scraper to download data from OkCupid. > "There's a difference, based on the barrier to accessing that information" What is "that information" in the case of this OkCupid study, and what is the "barrier," before and after the research was published? If the "information" is, for example, the fact that your spouse is cheating on you, does this research really remove any "barrier" to make it easier to discover than it was before publishing? If I wanted to know if my spouse was cheating on me, I could simply create an OkCupid profile and check the listings in my local town around my spouse's age range. Releasing the data of 60,000 OkCupid accounts, all of which is accessible from simply logging into the website, does not make it any easier for me to find that profile. Also note that this is different from, say, the Ashley Madison hack, where email addresses were released from an internal, private database. The emails were not "public" information before the data dump, and therefore the data dump lowered the "barrier" to searching for a target individual amongst the thousands of members. In this case, it seems the "data dump" did not introduce any new paths of accessing information. Instead it simply mirrored information that already exists and is readily accessible by effectively anyone with a computer.

chimeracoder 10y ago
> What is "that information" in the case of this OkCupid study, and what is the "barrier," before and after the research was published? To clarify, I'm contesting this statement: > Perhaps a better use of this soapbox, instead of lambasting the researchers, would be to raise awareness of the fact that what you put onto the Internet is public. on the grounds that, even if we were talking entirely about information that is already 100% 'public', there are ethical concerns with making already-public information more readily accessible (and therefore easier to use for nefarious purposes). Doxxing is an easy example because most people generally agree that it crosses some sort of ethical line, and there are plenty of clear examples where doxxed information has been used for nefarious purposes (ie, to harass, stalk, and/or abuse the victim). In other words, I'm not saying that all of the information in this particular case was already public. I'm saying that focusing on that distinction is a distraction from the underlying issue.
- chatmasta 10y ago
  Yes, and I'm contesting the statement that this research made any information "more readily accessible." In what way was information inaccessible before the study, and accessible afterward? The only qualifying scenario I can think of is if someone deleted their profile during the study, and it "reappeared" as a result of the study publishing its data.
  - sinxoveretothex 10y ago
    There's a difference between "making more accessible" and "making accessible". The latter means that information that was _inaccessible_ was made accessible (ergo: you couldn't access the information before the event). The former is less constrained: it just means that whatever state of accessibility the information was in, it is now easier to access. As an example: digitizing a book that is available for free to anyone who goes to Public Library One in Big City makes it more accessible (because I can access it from the other side of the world while eating soup) even though it wasn't _inaccessible_ before.

drdaeman 10y ago

> Most technical people consider 'doxxing' to be bad. By the way. I'm genuinely curious - were there any researches on this sort of statistics? If you know of anything like that, would you mind sharing? I suspect (without any basis) that if a different groups to be compared, the fraction among the STEM people could be somewhat lower, relative to others.

EdHominem 10y ago

What's bad is the (usual) calls for unlawful action against the target.