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Informed consent is a standard practice for human experimentation. It's a serious ethical lapse that the web companies have decided it doesn't apply to them sim

Informed consent is a standard practice for human experimentation. It's a serious ethical lapse that the web companies have decided it doesn't apply to them simply because it's inconvenient. Here's some references: https://researchbasics.education.uconn.edu/ethics-and-informed-consent/ https://researchbasics.education.uconn.edu/ethics-and-inform... https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/conducting-ethical-user-research https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/conduc...

whimsicalism 5y ago
Research ethics is way too deontologically focused, it needs reform. See: at minimum tens of thousands of deaths directly caused by failure to use challenge trials.
skybrian 5y ago
This is often taken too far. If the research is "try out an experimental medicine" then yes, of course you need informed consent, because the patient is taking a risk. If it's "see which color blue people like best in your UI" then this is nonsense. Nobody is going to be harmed regardless of which color blue you pick, so they don't need to be informed. Some privacy zealots may want to be informed, but they don't have a reasonable argument for why they need to know.
- colordrops 5y ago
  It doesn't need to be so life or death here. This is a privacy focused browser with the explicit message that it cuts out tracking, so the tracking without consent is pure hypocrisy.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  It absolutely should apply to psychological experiments as well. If you can't see that treating fellow humans as lab rats for you to experiment on is deeply problematic, then you're an actual sociopath. I don't care how you rationalize it, as long as there is any sort of intervention, you need informed consent.
  - skybrian 5y ago
    If changing a color in a UI is a "psychological experiment" then all artists and UI designers are doing psychological experiments all the time. Are you doing a psychological experiment every time you edit a CSS file? This is redefining something ordinary to sound bad, but that doesn't make it bad.
    - marginalia_nu 5y ago
      Secretly monitoring unaware people to see how they behave based on the UI design is absolutely experimenting on people, and deeply problematic. It doesn't matter if other people are doing it. It's wrong. People aren't for experimenting on.
      - scrollaway 5y ago
        It's experimenting on software, not experimenting on people. "People" aren't the part of the equation that anyone cares about in this scenario. And I do not think you're even sort of having this argument in good faith. You can't possibly be a rational person and believe that changing UI colors is "deeply problematic experimentation on people". Forgive me if I'm a little pissed off but this privacy extremism shit is exactly what leads to people looking down at anyone who is a privacy advocate as a nutjob. So, thanks a lot for that, more work for those of us out there who want, to, I dunno, protect citizens from being genuinely fucking spied on and their data passed around like candy so better ads can be served. But hey, it's all good, you're keeping those pesky UI designers from knowing which of their redesign is better, so at least we got that going for us.
        musicale 5y ago
        It seems a bit dismissive to wave off pp's discomfort with becoming an unwitting UI test subject. I also would not agree with any argument like "opt-in is necessary to reign in anti-privacy activities of bad companies like Facebook, but we're good UI designers at Mozilla so we don't need to use opt-in and can use opt-out with impunity." A browser that collects and reports any information on its users without their explicit permission is simply not putting privacy first. Any privacy-focused browser should make UI testing - or any other telemetry or analytics - opt-in and should generally clearly disclose any information being collected (and preferably make it available for inspection) and also describe all parties that will have access to the information as well as what it will be used for.

whimsicalism 5y ago

Research ethics is way too deontologically focused, it needs reform. See: at minimum tens of thousands of deaths directly caused by failure to use challenge trials.

skybrian 5y ago

This is often taken too far. If the research is "try out an experimental medicine" then yes, of course you need informed consent, because the patient is taking a risk. If it's "see which color blue people like best in your UI" then this is nonsense. Nobody is going to be harmed regardless of which color blue you pick, so they don't need to be informed. Some privacy zealots may want to be informed, but they don't have a reasonable argument for why they need to know.

colordrops 5y ago
It doesn't need to be so life or death here. This is a privacy focused browser with the explicit message that it cuts out tracking, so the tracking without consent is pure hypocrisy.
marginalia_nu 5y ago
It absolutely should apply to psychological experiments as well. If you can't see that treating fellow humans as lab rats for you to experiment on is deeply problematic, then you're an actual sociopath. I don't care how you rationalize it, as long as there is any sort of intervention, you need informed consent.
- skybrian 5y ago
  If changing a color in a UI is a "psychological experiment" then all artists and UI designers are doing psychological experiments all the time. Are you doing a psychological experiment every time you edit a CSS file? This is redefining something ordinary to sound bad, but that doesn't make it bad.
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    Secretly monitoring unaware people to see how they behave based on the UI design is absolutely experimenting on people, and deeply problematic. It doesn't matter if other people are doing it. It's wrong. People aren't for experimenting on.
    - scrollaway 5y ago
      It's experimenting on software, not experimenting on people. "People" aren't the part of the equation that anyone cares about in this scenario. And I do not think you're even sort of having this argument in good faith. You can't possibly be a rational person and believe that changing UI colors is "deeply problematic experimentation on people". Forgive me if I'm a little pissed off but this privacy extremism shit is exactly what leads to people looking down at anyone who is a privacy advocate as a nutjob. So, thanks a lot for that, more work for those of us out there who want, to, I dunno, protect citizens from being genuinely fucking spied on and their data passed around like candy so better ads can be served. But hey, it's all good, you're keeping those pesky UI designers from knowing which of their redesign is better, so at least we got that going for us.
      - musicale 5y ago
        It seems a bit dismissive to wave off pp's discomfort with becoming an unwitting UI test subject. I also would not agree with any argument like "opt-in is necessary to reign in anti-privacy activities of bad companies like Facebook, but we're good UI designers at Mozilla so we don't need to use opt-in and can use opt-out with impunity." A browser that collects and reports any information on its users without their explicit permission is simply not putting privacy first. Any privacy-focused browser should make UI testing - or any other telemetry or analytics - opt-in and should generally clearly disclose any information being collected (and preferably make it available for inspection) and also describe all parties that will have access to the information as well as what it will be used for.