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I was part of a human subject research study without my consent

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Re: I was part of a human subject research study without my consent

#231

Post by tgv »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #8

> My name is Maya Mishina, and I am a resident of Novosibirsk, Russia. If i received such an email, I would mark it as spam and move on with my life. Why did this blogger take it seriously? Does she take other forms of spam so seriously? I do feel for her stress and anxiety, but I also have to question her mental ability to filter noise. Life must be quite stressful for her overall.

Perhaps, but some people do reply to emails, for whatever reason. But that does not alter the fact that the study was conducted in an unethical manner.

Re: I was part of a human subject research study without my consent

#232

Post by andybak »

smsm42 wrote: post #171
jcims wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 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 devic…

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"

Re: I was part of a human subject research study without my consent

#233

Post by rmbyrro »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #48

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…

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.

Re: I was part of a human subject research study without my consent

#234

Post by dr_dshiv »

ellen364 wrote: post #225
Sebb767 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: I was part of a human subject research study without my consent

#235

Post by jfax »

lisper wrote: post #189
seanhunter wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well for starters they are lying and misreprenting themselves and the basis for their query. They say they are a data subject from Nice and represent that they are going to make a request under the CCPA. In actual practise they are a researcher from Princeton. If you don't think that's an ethical problem then I don't see it's worth discussing further. When you say "If I as an ordinary citizen..." you essentially make…

> They say they are a data subject from Nice Huh? Are we reading the same article? Because what I see is this: > My name is Maya Mishina, and I am a resident of Novosibirsk, Russia.

The article the article linked said Nice https://blog.freeradical.zone/post/ccpa-scam-2021-12/

Re: I was part of a human subject research study without my consent

#236

Post by dudeman13 »

brabel wrote: post #190
seanhunter wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well for starters they are lying and misreprenting themselves and the basis for their query. They say they are a data subject from Nice and represent that they are going to make a request under the CCPA. In actual practise they are a researcher from Princeton. If you don't think that's an ethical problem then I don't see it's worth discussing further. When you say "If I as an ordinary citizen..." you essentially make…

> they are lying and misreprenting themselves The police does that quite often to catch criminals. Sometimes they also target innocent people, is that ethical? People on HN don't usually lie, I hope, but most "misrepresent" themselves using anonymous accounts, sometimes claiming to be more than they actually are (I know, shocking). Emails you receive are more likely to be scams than not. If you're like the author and…

>The police does that quite often to catch criminals

Your country should crackdown on police behaviour.

Re: I was part of a human subject research study without my consent

#238

Post by dudeman13 »

morpheuskafka wrote: post #14
walrus01 wrote: post #6

How did anybody think it was appropriate to distress random human subjects by sending what appears at first glance to be a thinly veiled legal threat?

The problem I have with saying this is a threat is that a best the threat of a lawsuit is at best hypothetical--if and only if some response is required by that law, and that response is not given, then you could see it as a threat. And most people writing that would have no reason or resources to dedicate to some frivolous lawsuit as a result. Obviously no one would sue for getting a response a couple days late, it…

>threat of a lawsuit is at best hypothetical

Every lawsuit threat, including "I'm suing your ass next Tuesday", is hypothetical.

It takes being used to communication that randomly quotes the law, or extreme lack of social skills to not consider randomly quoting the law a threat. Individuals don't often randomly quote the law for the funsies.

We could, of course, argue all day whether they should have just immediately dismissed it as junk email, but coming from what looks like junk email just lowers the expected threat.

Re: I was part of a human subject research study without my consent

#239

Post by luckylion »

smsm42 wrote: post #153
quadrifoliate wrote: post #48

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…

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…

I guarantee you that you can send a similarly worded email in Germany to bloggers / small site operators about GDPR/DSGVO and you'll instill similar angst in the recipients.

"Before the courts and on the high seas, we are in God's hands" isn't a proverb for no reason, and it's valid pretty much anywhere.

Re: I was part of a human subject research study without my consent

#240

Post by luckylion »

mattbee wrote: post #220
walrus01 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

From a British perspective this sound like madness. We have a tradition of referring baseless legal threats to the precedent of Arkell v Pressdram.

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.

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