CS 5/692, Winter 2020

January 27 / Week 4

Privacy: Introduction & Research Practices

It terrifies me when those who are passionate about Big Data espouse the right to collect, aggregate, and analyze anything that they can get their hands on. In short, if it’s accessible, it’s fair game. To get here, we’ve perverted “public” to mean “accessible by anyone under any conditions at any time and for any purpose.” We’ve stripped content out of context, labeled it data, and justified our actions by the fact that we had access to it in the first place.

danah boyd, “Privacy and Publicity in the Context of Big Data”, presented at WWW ‘10 (emphasis added)

Readings

Required

• Baase, Chapter 2
• Rivers, C. M., & Lewis, B. L. (2014). Ethical research standards in a world of big data. F1000Research, 3(38).
• Zimmer, M. (2010). “But the data is already public‘’: on the ethics of research in Facebook. Ethics and Information Technology, 12(4), 313–325.
• Vitak, J., Shilton, K., & Ashktorab, Z. (2016). Beyond the Belmont Principles: Ethical Challenges, Practices, and Beliefs in the Online Data Research Community. Presented at the Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, New York, NY, USA: ACM.
• Keyes, O., Stevens, N., & Wernimont, J. The Government is Using the Most Vulnerable People to Test Facial Recognition Software. Slate, 3/17/2019

Recommended

• Nissenbaum, H. (2011). A Contextual Approach to Privacy Online. Daedalus, 140(4), 32–48.
• Zimmer, M. (2018). Addressing Conceptual Gaps in Big Data Research Ethics: An Application of Contextual Integrity. Social Media + Society, 4(2).