19 ms·

A lot of people mocking the author or others for being scared and worried are basically blaming the victim here, and I would like them to stop. The nature of l

A lot of people mocking the author or others for being scared and worried are basically blaming the victim here, and I would like them to stop. The nature of legal practices in the USA is such that the answers to "Are you totally in the clear legally?" and "Will you lose significant amounts of money proving in random courts that you are in the clear legally?" are often both yes. As a result, any researchers who send out thinly veiled legal threats as a "research experiment" are firmly in the wrong ethically, and should be called out by all the people to whom they have issued these veiled threats. Review boards that approved this experiment should be themselves subjected to an audit and potentially dissolved.

walrus01 5y ago
Absolutely agreed. In the present USA legal system, even if you win a resounding "victory" against an absolutely frivolous civil litigant, you are often left with significant legal costs and wasted days of your own time that you could have spent doing something else with your life.
0cVlTeIATBs 5y ago
What specifically is there to fear from an email like this? For one the sender opens by admitting they are not protected by the CCPA, and a quick reading about this law shows it does not apply to an individual's personal blog. If a Russian were able to file suit in California, wouldn't the defendant have a chance early on to ask a judge to dismiss it? I'm trying to sound naive because I want some gory details.
- walrus01 5y ago
  > If a Russian were able to file suit in California, wouldn't the defendant have a chance early on to ask a judge to dismiss it? a particularly foolish or over-confident defendent might represent themselves, but otherwise, I would not budget less than $2000-3000 to hire a lawyer to draft and file a response to statement of claim and show up in court to attempt to get it dismissed before it gets started.
  - Talanes 5y ago
    > a particularly foolish or over-confident defendent might represent themselves, but otherwise, I would not budget less than $2000-3000 to hire a lawyer Foolish, overconfident, or just "never have had $3000 in one place and time in my entire life."
  - mattbee 5y ago
    From a British perspective this sound like madness. We have a tradition of referring baseless legal threats to the precedent of Arkell v Pressdram.
    - ealexhudson 5y ago
      A non-baseless threat so referred would land you in deep trouble, however. I think the core issue here is not being able to distinguish the two cases easily.
      - mattbee 5y ago
        Absolutely, and I'm sure this is very industrially & culturally-specific experience. I don't blame OP for not being able to distinguish. (though I wouldn't have even read the whole email before hitting delete) Personally I've told some expensive solicitors to get lost successfully, and for some I've engaged my own & spent tens of thousands. I suppose I tended to be aware of legal risks that I was running in my old business. But lawyers are trying to get a result for their client as fast as possible. So if they've sent you something full of hand-waving jargon, they're either not very good at communicating (& not the kind of lawyer used to taking things further) or they're trying to intimidate because they've not got anything substantial to say. Also (in my xp) it's rare that a lawyer won't clarify something they've written unless they're being paid to intimidate, and (in the UK at least) a judge will have short shrift with a plaintiff if pre-trial communications were insubstantial and intimidatory. You can't just be summoned to court with no idea what you did wrong.
    - luckylion 5y ago
      From what I understand, that case wasn't necessarily baseless, but they drew media attention to it by publishing the letters. Arkell withdrew his claims following _that_. For most people, if you pull them into the spot light, you will quickly shut them up. That does not make their legal threats baseless.
- watwut 5y ago
  As I understand it, it is pretty easy to make small formal mistake that will make you loose without ever being heard.
42jd 5y ago
Yep I posted this hoping to raise awareness, but the reaction was not what I expected. In the US even a meritless legal threat will require hiring a lawyer to ensure you are in the clear which requires significant amount of money, in addition to the stress. Researchers should never be putting anyone in that position.
- 42jd 5y ago
  Just going to tag along to my comment above. I can't help but notice the difference in tone of the responses to this article vs. the one yesterday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29599553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29599553) which I did not see. It seems those who participated in the thread yesterday had a quite different opinion.
  - Sebb767 5y ago
    I guess it's the wording. "without my consent" is used to imply a strong violation of the personality rights, at least in some circles [0]. It's also pretty much a repeat of yesterdays post. At least to me, this makes the issue feel a bit overblown. [0] The irony that the whole problem is based on wording that implies a lawsuit is not lost on me.
    - hellbannedguy 5y ago
      When ever I read an email with Russia in it; I delete it.
    - ellen364 5y ago
      Getting “informed consent” is one of the big, guiding principles for research done on humans. My guess is the author deliberately used that language of the scientific community, to make clear that they did not agree to be part of the research.
      - dr_dshiv 5y ago
        Yeah, but the idea of “informed consent” is misunderstood broadly. There is no constitutional right to informed consent. Not all human subjects research requires informed consent — or even consent. There are other institutional ethical lapses that are much more dangerous — and there are also ethical attitudes that rest on the researcher, not the institution. Righteous indignation over something like this is dangerous, not least because it can lead to science being much harder (more bureaucratic and more expensive) to do by all scientists. “More oversight” or “dissolve the irb” all put too much responsibility on the institution. Sometimes, we should just blame the people who did something rude and stupid not the institution.
Sebb767 5y ago
> A lot of people mocking the author or others for being scared and worried are basically blaming the victim here, and I would like them to stop. I don't think this is mocking (excluding the few obligatory spammers). It's a known fact that if you have a public e-mail, you will receive a lot of spam and threats. Also, an actual request could've very well taken a similar form - would you have been okay with this if they actually requested their data? I'm not saying these actions were great. Sending out these mails was definitely not the nice thing to do. And yes, the threat of a lawsuit can be very scary. But, unfortunately, this is something you must be able to handle as a webmaster. It's also not great or nice that people try to log into my ssh server all the time, but this is just something you get when you have an ssh server on the internet. Same thing.
charcircuit 5y ago
>thinly veiled legal threats How is asking someone questions a legal threat?
- pdonis 5y ago
  Asking someone questions about their compliance with a law is not the same as asking someone questions about an innocuous subject.
  - charcircuit 5y ago
    If I ask if your site complies with COPPA, that's not a threat that I'm going to sue you.
    - kube-system 5y ago
      If I ask you a peculiar question you may wonder what my motivation was for asking it.
    - kelnos 5y ago
      Maybe you know that, but I don't.
    - pdonis 5y ago
      You might claim that it isn't, but if you are just asking me that question out of the blue I'm certainly going to wonder why you're asking and what you're up to. A random individual that goes around asking individuals who have websites if their websites comply with some law can't claim that they're just behaving in a normal everyday manner.
- msla 5y ago
  > How is asking someone questions a legal threat? Asking questions is an implied threat often enough that a question can indeed effectively be a threat.
- dqv 5y ago
  They weren't just asking questions. From the email: >My questions are about your process for when I do submit a request. It's really easy to read this as "I am going to be submitting a request." >I look forward to your reply without undue delay and at most within 45 days of this email, as required by Section 1798.130 of the California Civil Code. So I'd say there is some legal threat here.
rectang 5y ago
I think the derision illustrates a low ethical floor in the industry. Intimidating users with legalese is standard business practice, for instance in user agreements. The fearful effect it has on the less knowledgeable, competent, and resourceful among us doesn't even seem to register. It reminds me of abusive sales techniques that victimize seniors, and the salespeople who chortle at the stupidity of those who get taken in.
- walrus01 5y ago
  Abusive sales techniques aren't just for the elderly, if you've ever seen a car dealer sell a Dodge Charger or similar to a gullible US military E2 at 22% interest on an 84 month term...
  - rectang 5y ago
    You're absolutely right. I happened to be thinking about specific distressed elders in my life who I have had to talk down because they are worried about getting scammed, and the emotional toll it's taken on them. Not everybody has enough expertise to navigate potential scams reliably and with minimal stress — such expertise exists on a continuum.
smsm42 5y ago
I had similar thoughts when I read this story: how messed up is the legal climate in the US if a person who knows for sure they did absolutely nothing wrong should be scared by obvious nonsense email instead of laughing it off and deleting it? I don't diminish the ethical breach the researchers committed - they clearly shouldn't be inflicting any amount of mental anguish on people that did not agree to be part of any study. But it's not the only - and not the largest - problem here. The climate where this thing is seriously scary to so many people is really messed up.
- jcims 5y ago
  It’s not obvious they did nothing wrong. The referenced statute creates an obligation to respond to inquiries and not everyone is comfortable making their own decision whether or not it applies to them.
  - smsm42 5y ago
    It creates an obligation to businesses selling user data, or ones with revenues over 25 millions. It's not hard to find either: https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa The CCPA applies to for-profit businesses that do business in California and meet any of the following: Have a gross annual revenue of over $25 million; Buy, receive, or sell the personal information of 50,000 or more California residents, households, or devices; or Derive 50% or more of their annual revenue from selling California residents’ personal information. It's not a very hard decision to make, the text is pretty clear. Especially if literally the fifth word of it - "for profit" - makes the further reading unnecessary.
    - andybak 5y ago
      I'm reading that and I can already see things that require me to think hard about whether it might apply. > any of the following OK > Buy, receive, or sell the personal information of 50,000 or more California residents, "receive" and "50,000" seem like a low bar if the definition of "personal" includes anything caught in typical web logging. You see? It's not clear cut from reading the thing you just said was very clear and it's hard to be 100% sure it doesn't apply. "For profit" and "business" and similarly wide nets. Business can include individual sole traders and "profit" could be "accepting donations" or "running AdWords"
radu_floricica 5y ago
This I think is a typical example of having to hold two opposite thoughts at the same time. Yes, it's a bad thing to do, it's pretty obvious that it'll scare the bejesus out of some people and even worse, have some chilling effect. On the other hand the pendulum on ethical boards has gone waaaay in the other direction to the point where a lot of very useful research doesn't get done. The most vivid example being that we don't have human challenge trials with Covid, even now when it's crystal clear that actual risks to young healthy people are close to zero. Another example: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/ So, what's my opinion? Well, an "opinion" would require me to chose one of those two perfectly valid points of view. But if I had to, I'd say the travesty that is "ethics boards" has become a bureaucracy so rotten it doesn't even perform its original function of stopping vaguely unethical research, and has instead gone completely the way of paper pushing. While, of course, still drawing a salary from making sure tens of thousands of people are dying needlessly.
- dendriti 5y ago
  This is an interesting take. What "very useful research" is being blocked by which IRBs? FWIW, the author of the essay at the link you provided seems deeply ignorant of why IRBs exist. "Mere resident doctors weren’t allowed to do studies on their own. They would probably screw up and start building concentration camps or something. " really?
  - radu_floricica 5y ago
    The irony of calling Scott Alexander "deeply ignorant" :) Human challenge trials. Hundreds of thousands of dead later, and we're still using statistics to answer questions like "is Omicron ignoring immunity", instead of answering them definitely in a few days with an absolute minimum of risk. I'd volunteer for that, btw, so would literally millions. But it's just not inside the Overton window. This isn't wisdom or caution. It's plain cowardice.
    - seebs 5y ago
      The reason for this isn't "cowardice", though. I've read a lot of things by practicing people in the field on reasons for which they don't think human challenge trials produce reliable enough data. (Basically: You don't get a representative sample, and you get an unrepresentative sample in ways that are very likely to result in you getting bad data.) There's other reasons to distrust them, and I don't think your assumption that "an absolute minimum of risk" is really on the table is even defensible. And on the whole I think we probably should be using them anyway, with caveats -- but your argumentation here is bad.
tommek4077 5y ago
Would it not need something written (paper) in the US to start anything? In most european countries you just ignore mails with stuff like this and wont be scared in anyway, just as you are not to be scammed by our beloved nigerian prince.
- dawnbreez 5y ago
  Not a lawyer, but: Not really. You do have to present the case to the judge in a certain format to start it, but as I understand it, there's no requirement for you to send notice to the guy you're suing in a specific format. Once the suit starts, contacting the other party is taken care of either by the court or by your lawyer.
andylynch 5y ago
Yes I don’t quite understand the need for deception here. I guess they were trying to blind the responses. If I were on the receiving end, I’d be wary too but on the flip side a simple email from the researchers to ask with a link to the study website would be fine.
rmbyrro 5y ago
For people to have a vague idea, relatively cheap lawyers in the US charge upwards from $300-500/hour and you have no control of how many hours they'll log in.
giantg2 5y ago
"Are you totally in the clear legally?" Based on the way the system works, especially the civil side, it's sometimes impossible to even answer this question.
impendingchange 5y ago
In light of the current experimental "trial" drug being pushed nowadays, _everyone_ should consider themselves a part of the trial, because even if you do not take the drug, you are part of the control group.

walrus01 5y ago

Absolutely agreed. In the present USA legal system, even if you win a resounding "victory" against an absolutely frivolous civil litigant, you are often left with significant legal costs and wasted days of your own time that you could have spent doing something else with your life.

0cVlTeIATBs 5y ago

What specifically is there to fear from an email like this? For one the sender opens by admitting they are not protected by the CCPA, and a quick reading about this law shows it does not apply to an individual's personal blog. If a Russian were able to file suit in California, wouldn't the defendant have a chance early on to ask a judge to dismiss it? I'm trying to sound naive because I want some gory details.

walrus01 5y ago
> If a Russian were able to file suit in California, wouldn't the defendant have a chance early on to ask a judge to dismiss it? a particularly foolish or over-confident defendent might represent themselves, but otherwise, I would not budget less than $2000-3000 to hire a lawyer to draft and file a response to statement of claim and show up in court to attempt to get it dismissed before it gets started.
- Talanes 5y ago
  > a particularly foolish or over-confident defendent might represent themselves, but otherwise, I would not budget less than $2000-3000 to hire a lawyer Foolish, overconfident, or just "never have had $3000 in one place and time in my entire life."
- mattbee 5y ago
  From a British perspective this sound like madness. We have a tradition of referring baseless legal threats to the precedent of Arkell v Pressdram.
  - ealexhudson 5y ago
    A non-baseless threat so referred would land you in deep trouble, however. I think the core issue here is not being able to distinguish the two cases easily.
    - mattbee 5y ago
      Absolutely, and I'm sure this is very industrially & culturally-specific experience. I don't blame OP for not being able to distinguish. (though I wouldn't have even read the whole email before hitting delete) Personally I've told some expensive solicitors to get lost successfully, and for some I've engaged my own & spent tens of thousands. I suppose I tended to be aware of legal risks that I was running in my old business. But lawyers are trying to get a result for their client as fast as possible. So if they've sent you something full of hand-waving jargon, they're either not very good at communicating (& not the kind of lawyer used to taking things further) or they're trying to intimidate because they've not got anything substantial to say. Also (in my xp) it's rare that a lawyer won't clarify something they've written unless they're being paid to intimidate, and (in the UK at least) a judge will have short shrift with a plaintiff if pre-trial communications were insubstantial and intimidatory. You can't just be summoned to court with no idea what you did wrong.
  - luckylion 5y ago
    From what I understand, that case wasn't necessarily baseless, but they drew media attention to it by publishing the letters. Arkell withdrew his claims following _that_. For most people, if you pull them into the spot light, you will quickly shut them up. That does not make their legal threats baseless.
watwut 5y ago
As I understand it, it is pretty easy to make small formal mistake that will make you loose without ever being heard.

42jd 5y ago

Yep I posted this hoping to raise awareness, but the reaction was not what I expected. In the US even a meritless legal threat will require hiring a lawyer to ensure you are in the clear which requires significant amount of money, in addition to the stress. Researchers should never be putting anyone in that position.

42jd 5y ago
Just going to tag along to my comment above. I can't help but notice the difference in tone of the responses to this article vs. the one yesterday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29599553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29599553) which I did not see. It seems those who participated in the thread yesterday had a quite different opinion.
- Sebb767 5y ago
  I guess it's the wording. "without my consent" is used to imply a strong violation of the personality rights, at least in some circles [0]. It's also pretty much a repeat of yesterdays post. At least to me, this makes the issue feel a bit overblown. [0] The irony that the whole problem is based on wording that implies a lawsuit is not lost on me.
  - hellbannedguy 5y ago
    When ever I read an email with Russia in it; I delete it.
  - ellen364 5y ago
    Getting “informed consent” is one of the big, guiding principles for research done on humans. My guess is the author deliberately used that language of the scientific community, to make clear that they did not agree to be part of the research.
    - dr_dshiv 5y ago
      Yeah, but the idea of “informed consent” is misunderstood broadly. There is no constitutional right to informed consent. Not all human subjects research requires informed consent — or even consent. There are other institutional ethical lapses that are much more dangerous — and there are also ethical attitudes that rest on the researcher, not the institution. Righteous indignation over something like this is dangerous, not least because it can lead to science being much harder (more bureaucratic and more expensive) to do by all scientists. “More oversight” or “dissolve the irb” all put too much responsibility on the institution. Sometimes, we should just blame the people who did something rude and stupid not the institution.

Sebb767 5y ago

> A lot of people mocking the author or others for being scared and worried are basically blaming the victim here, and I would like them to stop. I don't think this is mocking (excluding the few obligatory spammers). It's a known fact that if you have a public e-mail, you will receive a lot of spam and threats. Also, an actual request could've very well taken a similar form - would you have been okay with this if they actually requested their data? I'm not saying these actions were great. Sending out these mails was definitely not the nice thing to do. And yes, the threat of a lawsuit can be very scary. But, unfortunately, this is something you must be able to handle as a webmaster. It's also not great or nice that people try to log into my ssh server all the time, but this is just something you get when you have an ssh server on the internet. Same thing.

charcircuit 5y ago

>thinly veiled legal threats How is asking someone questions a legal threat?

pdonis 5y ago
Asking someone questions about their compliance with a law is not the same as asking someone questions about an innocuous subject.
- charcircuit 5y ago
  If I ask if your site complies with COPPA, that's not a threat that I'm going to sue you.
  - kube-system 5y ago
    If I ask you a peculiar question you may wonder what my motivation was for asking it.
  - kelnos 5y ago
    Maybe you know that, but I don't.
  - pdonis 5y ago
    You might claim that it isn't, but if you are just asking me that question out of the blue I'm certainly going to wonder why you're asking and what you're up to. A random individual that goes around asking individuals who have websites if their websites comply with some law can't claim that they're just behaving in a normal everyday manner.
msla 5y ago
> How is asking someone questions a legal threat? Asking questions is an implied threat often enough that a question can indeed effectively be a threat.
dqv 5y ago
They weren't just asking questions. From the email: >My questions are about your process for when I do submit a request. It's really easy to read this as "I am going to be submitting a request." >I look forward to your reply without undue delay and at most within 45 days of this email, as required by Section 1798.130 of the California Civil Code. So I'd say there is some legal threat here.

rectang 5y ago

I think the derision illustrates a low ethical floor in the industry. Intimidating users with legalese is standard business practice, for instance in user agreements. The fearful effect it has on the less knowledgeable, competent, and resourceful among us doesn't even seem to register. It reminds me of abusive sales techniques that victimize seniors, and the salespeople who chortle at the stupidity of those who get taken in.

walrus01 5y ago
Abusive sales techniques aren't just for the elderly, if you've ever seen a car dealer sell a Dodge Charger or similar to a gullible US military E2 at 22% interest on an 84 month term...
- rectang 5y ago
  You're absolutely right. I happened to be thinking about specific distressed elders in my life who I have had to talk down because they are worried about getting scammed, and the emotional toll it's taken on them. Not everybody has enough expertise to navigate potential scams reliably and with minimal stress — such expertise exists on a continuum.

smsm42 5y ago

I had similar thoughts when I read this story: how messed up is the legal climate in the US if a person who knows for sure they did absolutely nothing wrong should be scared by obvious nonsense email instead of laughing it off and deleting it? I don't diminish the ethical breach the researchers committed - they clearly shouldn't be inflicting any amount of mental anguish on people that did not agree to be part of any study. But it's not the only - and not the largest - problem here. The climate where this thing is seriously scary to so many people is really messed up.

jcims 5y ago
It’s not obvious they did nothing wrong. The referenced statute creates an obligation to respond to inquiries and not everyone is comfortable making their own decision whether or not it applies to them.
- smsm42 5y ago
  It creates an obligation to businesses selling user data, or ones with revenues over 25 millions. It's not hard to find either: https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa The CCPA applies to for-profit businesses that do business in California and meet any of the following: Have a gross annual revenue of over $25 million; Buy, receive, or sell the personal information of 50,000 or more California residents, households, or devices; or Derive 50% or more of their annual revenue from selling California residents’ personal information. It's not a very hard decision to make, the text is pretty clear. Especially if literally the fifth word of it - "for profit" - makes the further reading unnecessary.
  - andybak 5y ago
    I'm reading that and I can already see things that require me to think hard about whether it might apply. > any of the following OK > Buy, receive, or sell the personal information of 50,000 or more California residents, "receive" and "50,000" seem like a low bar if the definition of "personal" includes anything caught in typical web logging. You see? It's not clear cut from reading the thing you just said was very clear and it's hard to be 100% sure it doesn't apply. "For profit" and "business" and similarly wide nets. Business can include individual sole traders and "profit" could be "accepting donations" or "running AdWords"

radu_floricica 5y ago

This I think is a typical example of having to hold two opposite thoughts at the same time. Yes, it's a bad thing to do, it's pretty obvious that it'll scare the bejesus out of some people and even worse, have some chilling effect. On the other hand the pendulum on ethical boards has gone waaaay in the other direction to the point where a lot of very useful research doesn't get done. The most vivid example being that we don't have human challenge trials with Covid, even now when it's crystal clear that actual risks to young healthy people are close to zero. Another example: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/ So, what's my opinion? Well, an "opinion" would require me to chose one of those two perfectly valid points of view. But if I had to, I'd say the travesty that is "ethics boards" has become a bureaucracy so rotten it doesn't even perform its original function of stopping vaguely unethical research, and has instead gone completely the way of paper pushing. While, of course, still drawing a salary from making sure tens of thousands of people are dying needlessly.

dendriti 5y ago
This is an interesting take. What "very useful research" is being blocked by which IRBs? FWIW, the author of the essay at the link you provided seems deeply ignorant of why IRBs exist. "Mere resident doctors weren’t allowed to do studies on their own. They would probably screw up and start building concentration camps or something. " really?
- radu_floricica 5y ago
  The irony of calling Scott Alexander "deeply ignorant" :) Human challenge trials. Hundreds of thousands of dead later, and we're still using statistics to answer questions like "is Omicron ignoring immunity", instead of answering them definitely in a few days with an absolute minimum of risk. I'd volunteer for that, btw, so would literally millions. But it's just not inside the Overton window. This isn't wisdom or caution. It's plain cowardice.
  - seebs 5y ago
    The reason for this isn't "cowardice", though. I've read a lot of things by practicing people in the field on reasons for which they don't think human challenge trials produce reliable enough data. (Basically: You don't get a representative sample, and you get an unrepresentative sample in ways that are very likely to result in you getting bad data.) There's other reasons to distrust them, and I don't think your assumption that "an absolute minimum of risk" is really on the table is even defensible. And on the whole I think we probably should be using them anyway, with caveats -- but your argumentation here is bad.

tommek4077 5y ago

Would it not need something written (paper) in the US to start anything? In most european countries you just ignore mails with stuff like this and wont be scared in anyway, just as you are not to be scammed by our beloved nigerian prince.

dawnbreez 5y ago
Not a lawyer, but: Not really. You do have to present the case to the judge in a certain format to start it, but as I understand it, there's no requirement for you to send notice to the guy you're suing in a specific format. Once the suit starts, contacting the other party is taken care of either by the court or by your lawyer.

andylynch 5y ago

Yes I don’t quite understand the need for deception here. I guess they were trying to blind the responses. If I were on the receiving end, I’d be wary too but on the flip side a simple email from the researchers to ask with a link to the study website would be fine.

rmbyrro 5y ago

For people to have a vague idea, relatively cheap lawyers in the US charge upwards from $300-500/hour and you have no control of how many hours they'll log in.

giantg2 5y ago

"Are you totally in the clear legally?" Based on the way the system works, especially the civil side, it's sometimes impossible to even answer this question.

impendingchange 5y ago

In light of the current experimental "trial" drug being pushed nowadays, _everyone_ should consider themselves a part of the trial, because even if you do not take the drug, you are part of the control group.