skip to main content
research-article

How to throw the race to the bottom: revisiting signals for ethical and legal research using online data

Published:19 February 2015Publication History
Skip Abstract Section

Abstract

With research using data available online, researcher conduct is not fully prescribed or proscribed by formal ethical codes of conduct or law because of ill-fitting "expectations signals" -- indicators of legal and ethical risk. This article describes where these ordering forces breakdown in the context of online research and suggests how to identify and respond to these grey areas by applying common legal and ethical tenets that run across evolving models. It is intended to advance the collective dialogue work-in-progress toward a path that revisits and harmonizes more appropriate ethical and legal signals for research using online data between and among researchers, oversight entities, policymakers and society.

References

  1. University of Michigan Human Research Protection Program. Research Using Publicly Available Data Sets: UM Policy. http://www.hrpp.umich.edu/initiative/datasets.html (revised May 2008).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  2. University of Washington. Human Subjects Division. Public Data Sets. https://www.washington.edu/research/hsd/topics/Public+Data+Sets.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  3. Cal. Penal Code Section 632 (California makes it a crime to record or eavesdrop on any confidential communication, including a private conversation, without the consent of all parties to the conversation).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  4. Updated Administration Proposal. http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/legislative/letters/updated-law-enforcement-tools.pdf (Executive Office of the President, proposed new laws against hacking that would arguably make it a felony to intentionally access unauthorized informationăeven if it has been posted to a public website, as well as to traffic in information like passwords, including posting a link) (visited January 15, 2014).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  5. Opinion 9/2014 on the Application of Directive 2002/58/EC to Device Fingerprinting. 14/EN, WP 224 (adopted on 25 November 2014). =http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/article-29/documentation/opinion-recommendation/files/2014/wp224_en.pdf.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  6. United States v. Aaron Swartz. 1: 11-cr-10260, 106 (D. Mass. filed Jan. 14, 2013) (accessed at: http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/217115/20110719schwartz.pdf.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  7. S. Afroz, V. Garg, D. Mccoy, and R. Greenstadt. Honor among thieves: A common's analysis of cybercrime economies. In eCrime Researchers Summit (eCRS), 2013, pages 1--11, Sept 2013.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  8. S. Afroz, A. Islam, A. Stolerman, R. Greenstadt, and D. Mccoy. Doppelganger finder: Taking stylometry to the underground. In Security and Privacy (SP), 2014 IEEE Symposium on, pages 212--226, May 2014. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  9. J. Bonneau and S. Preibusch. The privacy jungle: On the market for data protection in social networks. In Economics of information security and privacy, pages 121--167. Springer, 2010.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  10. Internet Census 2012, Port scanning /0 using insecure embedded devices. http://internetcensus2012.bitbucket.org/paper.html.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  11. D. Carr. A journalist-agitator facing prison over a link, September 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/09/business/media/a-journalist-agitator-facing-prison-over-a-link.html?pagewanted=all_r=0.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  12. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S. Code Section 1030 Fraud and related activity in connection with computers. Available at: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  13. M. Crowley. No rules of cyberwar. December 2014. Quote from Keith Alexander, former NSA Director and head of U.S. Cyber Command in response to the November 2014 Sony hacking incident.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  14. Security breach notification laws. Available at: http://www.ncsl.org/research/telecommunications-andinformationtechnology/securitybreachnotification-laws.aspx.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  15. Y.-A. de Montjoye, C. A. Hidalgo, M. Verleysen, and V. D. Blondel. Unique in the crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility. Sci. Rep., 3, 03 2013/03/25/online.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  16. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (ECPA), Pub. L. 99-508, oct. 21, 1986, 100 Stat. 1848 (1986). Available at: http://www.law.cornell.edu/topn/electronic_communications privacy_act_of_1986.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  17. Data Protection Act 1998. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/29/part/IV.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  18. 17 U.S. Code Section 107 Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  19. J. Ferro, L. Singh, and M. Sherr. Identifying individual vulnerability based on public data. In 2013 Eleventh Annual International Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust (PST), pages 119--126, July 2013.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  20. Federal Trade Commission Act, Section 5, 15 U.S. Code 45 - unfair methods of competition unlawful. Accessed at: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/45.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  21. S. Gorman. Networks, Security and Complexity: The Role of Public Policy in Critical Infrastructure Protection. Edward Alger Publishing, London, UK, 2005. Sean Gorman Ph.D thesis publication that documented SCADA vulnerabilities). Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  22. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) Breach Notification Rule, 45 CFR 164.400-414. Available at: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR201301-25/pdf/201301073.pdf.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  23. E. Kenneally and D. Dittrich. Applying Ethical Principles to Information and Communication Technology Research-A Companion to the Menlo Report. https://predict.org/Portals/Documents/Menlo-Report-Companion.pdf.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  24. E. Kenneally and D. Dittrich. The Menlo Report: Ethical Principles Guiding Information and Communication Technology Research. https://predict.org/Portals/Documents/Menlo-Report.pdf.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  25. K. J. Lee and I.-Y. Song. Modeling and analyzing user behavior of privacy management on online social network: Research in progress. In Privacy, Security, Risk and Trust (PASSAT) and 2011 IEEE Third International Conference on Social Computing (SocialCom), 2011 IEEE Third International Conference on, pages 1344--1351, Oct 2011.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  26. K. Levchenko, A. Pitsillidis, N. Chachra, B. Enright, M. Felegyhazi, C. Grier, T. Halvorson, C. Kanich, C. Kreibich, H. Liu, D. McCoy, N. Weaver, V. Paxson, G. Voelker, and S. Savage. Click trajectories: End-to-end analysis of the spam value chain. In Security and Privacy (SP), 2011 IEEE Symposium on, pages 431--446, May 2011. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  27. A. Markham and E. Buchanan. Ethical decision-making and internet research recommendations from the aoir ethics working committee (version 2.0). December 2012. http://aoir.org/reports/ethics2.pdf".Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  28. D. McCoy, H. Dharmdasani, C. Kreibich, G. M. Voelker, and S. Savage. Priceless: The role of payments in abuse-advertised goods. In Proceedings of the 2012 ACM conference on Computer and communications security, pages 845--856. ACM, 2012. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  29. M. A. McGrath. Prescriber information and privacy: The costs of innovation in the healthcare industry. 2013.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  30. N. Nikiforakis, G. Acar, and D. Saelinger. Browse at your own risk. Spectrum, IEEE, 51(8): 30--35, August 2014.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  31. S. e. a. Nirkhi. Analysis of online messages for identity tracing in cybercrime investigation. pages 300--305, June 2012.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  32. Proposed Revisions to the Common Rule for the Protection of Human Subjects in the Behavioral and Social Sciences, 2014. http://www.nap.edu/catalog/18614/proposed-revisionstothecommon rulefortheprotectionofhumansubjectsinthebehavioralandsocialsciences.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  33. S. Peddinti, A. Korolova, E. Bursztein, and G. Sampemane. Cloak and swagger: Understanding data sensitivity through the lens of user anonymity. In Security and Privacy (SP), 2014 IEEE Symposium on, pages 493--508, May 2014. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  34. Open source intelligence tools list. (http://www.subliminalhacking.net/2012/12/27/osint-tools-recommendations-list/ (For example, various open source online intelligence tools like Pastebin, The Harvester, Shodan, Jigsaw, NetworkX Python).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  35. A. Ramachandran, L. Singh, E. Porter, and F. Nagle. Exploring re-identification risks in public domains. In 2012 Tenth Annual International Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust (PST), pages 35--42, July 2012. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  36. D. Sanger, December 2014. "U.S. Said to Find North Korea Ordered Cyberattack on Sony." http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/18/world/asia/us-linksnorthkoreatosonyhacking.html.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  37. H. Sarvari, E. Abozinadah, A. Mbaziira, and D. McCoy. Constructing and analyzing criminal networks. 2014.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  38. Scottish Health Informatics Program. http://www.scotshiptoolkit.org.uk/.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  39. L. Sweeney. Simple demographics often identify people uniquely., 2000. Carnegie Mellon University, Data Privacy Working Paper 3. http://dataprivacylab.org/projects/identifiability/paper1.pdf.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  40. O. Tene and J. Polonetsky. Big data for all: Privacy and user control in the age of analytics, 2013.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  41. W. Wineberg. www.exfiltrated.com (a website showing security data related to ICS / scada systems, smart grid devices, and medical devices).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  42. K. Zetter. AT&T hacker "Weev" sentenced to 3.5 years in prison, March 2013. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/03/att-hacker-gets-3-years/.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  43. M. Zimmer. But the data is already public? on the ethics of research in Facebook. Ethics and Information Technology, 12(4): 313--325, 2010. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library

Index Terms

  1. How to throw the race to the bottom: revisiting signals for ethical and legal research using online data

        Recommendations

        Comments

        Login options

        Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

        Sign in

        Full Access

        • Published in

          cover image ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society
          ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society  Volume 45, Issue 1
          February 2015
          39 pages
          ISSN:0095-2737
          DOI:10.1145/2738210
          Issue’s Table of Contents

          Copyright © 2015 Author

          Publisher

          Association for Computing Machinery

          New York, NY, United States

          Publication History

          • Published: 19 February 2015

          Check for updates

          Qualifiers

          • research-article

        PDF Format

        View or Download as a PDF file.

        PDF

        eReader

        View online with eReader.

        eReader