4 ms·

I think there are two important points, first that there is no longer a clear distinction between public and private spaces. To pick the immediate example, I am

by yk 10y ago

I think there are two important points, first that there is no longer a clear distinction between public and private spaces. To pick the immediate example, I am currently sitting in my bedroom, but on the other hand I am writing in a public forum. Plus there are conceptually less clear examples, for example chat rooms which are basically public, but I still have the expectation that everybody present belongs to a small community. The other important point is, that there is a shift to questions instead of answers. Technology moves just too fast to give good guidelines in terms of rules. It would perhaps help to define a questionnaire that researches have to fill out, just to demonstrate that they thought about the question. For example, the question "Which groups are especially vulnerable to a leak of the data?" may prompt filtering of said groups and prevent some damage. (That obviously does not help against black hats, but would probably helped in the current OKCupid case.) And lastly I think that there is a mismatch what "reasonable expectation of privacy" means, most people do not have any idea what "big data" means, they believe that Facebook reviews flagged comments, but do not understand that they can (and I would guess do) analyze each and every interaction with Facebook. (I don't mean to single out FB, it is just they are the most obvious example due to their size and the sort of private nature of the network.)

yeukhon 10y ago
Sorry, but neither point is convincing to me. First, I don't get why sitting in one's bedroom and writing in a public forum illustrate the clear distinction between public and private spaces. You already noted the forum is public. IT IS PUBLIC. If you put up your web page on the Internet and only search engine would ever come to your page, well, your page is still the public domain. Being in a small community, take a cult, well, if you show up in the public and doing your activity in the public, I would expect that to be a public demonstration. In fact, if you try to run naked with your cult in the middle of the street, you are going to get arrested and charged for public misconduct. If you are running naked in a cult house, well, that's private. The distinction is very clear in these examples. I am not arguing there aren't examples that would illustrate a blur, but your example is too weak. My response to the second suggestion. Well, leak of data is a big deal. So if my research somehow harms people with AIDS, am I allowed to collect the non-AID patients? Another way to put it, filtering doesn't do any good and provides no meaning. From an ethic standpoint, people aren't concerned about what groups will be harmed from the outcome of the research - because the whole point of research is to either validate or invalidate some hypothesis. Research ethic should be about the treatment of data and the process of conducting experiment. However, I do agree that some users aren't aware of what online service do with their application.

by yk 10y ago

yeukhon 10y ago

Sorry, but neither point is convincing to me. First, I don't get why sitting in one's bedroom and writing in a public forum illustrate the clear distinction between public and private spaces. You already noted the forum is public. IT IS PUBLIC. If you put up your web page on the Internet and only search engine would ever come to your page, well, your page is still the public domain. Being in a small community, take a cult, well, if you show up in the public and doing your activity in the public, I would expect that to be a public demonstration. In fact, if you try to run naked with your cult in the middle of the street, you are going to get arrested and charged for public misconduct. If you are running naked in a cult house, well, that's private. The distinction is very clear in these examples. I am not arguing there aren't examples that would illustrate a blur, but your example is too weak. My response to the second suggestion. Well, leak of data is a big deal. So if my research somehow harms people with AIDS, am I allowed to collect the non-AID patients? Another way to put it, filtering doesn't do any good and provides no meaning. From an ethic standpoint, people aren't concerned about what groups will be harmed from the outcome of the research - because the whole point of research is to either validate or invalidate some hypothesis. Research ethic should be about the treatment of data and the process of conducting experiment. However, I do agree that some users aren't aware of what online service do with their application.