The researcher is using the "secret shopper" justification for why secrecy was needed here. This completely undermines his receipt of exempt status for full re

The researcher is using the "secret shopper" justification for why secrecy was needed here. This completely undermines his receipt of exempt status for full review of human subjects in research. If he anticipated that behaviors of recipients would be different as a result of knowing whether or not the communication was an authentic request from a user. This is a bit of a subtle point and wouldn't necessarily expect a PhD student to pickup: It's really something-- depending on how the application was presented-- that the IRB should have caught. I'm surprised that any IRB would grant an exempt status under those conditions because it fundamentally meant the study was not passive data collection such as a surveys, which usually are exempt. Hopefully there is a public post mortem of how this approval went down. Considering the adverse impacts on display it was defacto a study that needed complete human subject review.