Prosecute, no. However, if this were in a more traditional scientific field, this sort of error would be treated as a serious lapse of experimental oversight p

Prosecute, no. However, if this were in a more traditional scientific field, this sort of error would be treated as a serious lapse of experimental oversight protocols and the school or the participants would be sanctioned according to their professional discipline (in this case, that would probably be the IEEE). Unethical experiments are a huge deal. If this had been an experiment on people face to face in e.g. a sociology context, then these students would likely have been expelled (and probably deported) and would likely be leaving the field. Since it was in an IT area, the U's oversight rules probably weren't even applied.