291–300 of 382 posts
I got an email from them too, asking about GDPR compliance. Isn't unsolicited mass email illegal under the GDPR? Maybe I should threaten to sue them .
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It really depends on your ethical framework doesn't it? People lie all the time for good reasons. Are those actions unethical? Further, I am struggling to see who was harmed here or how there was any ill intent. On top of that, the results of this study seem like they would be enlightening. It seems like society should want this experiment to be able to take place. Certainly a western liberal understanding of ethics…
"People lie all the time for good reasons. Are those actions unethical?" is whataboutism of the worst kind. We're not talking about any other hypothetical case where a person might lie for good reasons. We're talking about this case, and the lie/misrepresentation was at the heart of why it was unethical. Secondly, you say you don't see who was harmed - the person who posted the original blog post was clearly harmed.…
I don’t find this type of benign use of anonymity/misdirection to be an outright lie of the unethical kind.
> She had a panic attack she was so stressed about the legal implications of the implied threat.
What?! When/where? She said the request stressed her out… come on. If webmasters have panic attacks when encountering spam then perhaps we should outlaw spam (I’d support this).
> Your "put another way" extrapolation is just a complete straw man. Noone here other than you is talking about observing people in the park.
Please… I 100% do not understand the reason why this experiment should be considered unethical and I’m trying to explain what I see as parallels. It’s not a straw man and I’m not the only one.. read down thread.
What I’m looking for is an explanation for why you think that legal normal behavior (even behavior that causes stress) is allowable but legal normal behavior for science is not allowed.
I also believe context motive and intent matter, for the record (which I why I believe censorship imposes a net negative on society, example: comedians are “allowed” to use offensive language). I simply find the intent here to be arguably ethical depending on what your goal is for society.
For example, if the goal is to never have any individual experience 1 ounce more stress than is absolutely required throughout their life, then this behavior is unethical arguably whether it’s an experiment or not but definitely in the case of the experiment because it’s unnecessary. On the other hand, if your goal as a society is to make sure people’s data privacy rights are protected, it seems strictly ethical to conduct such an exercise to raise awareness and document how well institutions comply with the law.
Would it make sense to pursue a class-action claim against Princeton and the researchers to recover everyone’s legal costs and business disruption costs? Probably wouldn’t be that difficult to get the contact information of every business that was contacted during discovery, right?
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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 c…
As the author of that article, I bet I meet that bar as soon as one of my posts gets on the front page of Hacker News, very easily if I post multiple articles which ended up getting popular like I have this month.
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As the author of that article, I bet I meet that bar as soon as one of my posts gets on the front page of Hacker News, very easily if I post multiple articles which ended up getting popular like I have this month.
Why are you collecting personal information (IPs) of your readers though?
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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…
It sounds like this type research - which could alter the subject's actions and cause harm (costs) - should have included consent.
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My job involves DMCA pass through compliance and I have several hundred of such threats from a myriad of sources sitting in an inbox right now which say otherwise. Perhaps you've never had thousands of people torrenting movies using you as a service provider before.
I would hope someone in that position would understand the difference between a strongly worded email and a "actual legal threat". Serious lawyers don't use email.
I don’t know where you “learned” this false information, but I would recommend going to whatever authority figures are spouting this nonsense and correcting them.
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> Recommend you don’t spend “ thousands of dollars to hire a lawyer and file a response” on something that you find very slightly worrisome. I call a lawyer any time I have a legal question for which I am not confident about the answer. If it’s not a real problem, a lawyer will be able to answer it a fraction of an hour’s worth of billable time.
...which I hope you recognize is a very privileged position to be in.
Can someone help me understand the ethical problem here? If I as an ordinary citizen contacted the webmaster with a similar worded email, the result would have been the same. The fact is that this “experiment” did not create any more or additional stress than is created for normal citizens/businesses simply engaging in normal legal activities. If submitting such a request has the potential to cause such undue stress,…
Here’s an example. Your doctor calls to talk to you about you sexual health. You discuss at length about all the issues you’ve been having lately, and you break into tears when your doctor tells you it’s permanent. At the end of the call, your doctor explains that he/she was joking, and that you just have low vitamin levels. You find your anecdotal story in the front page of a medical journal the next year.
You can imagine similar situations where someone calls to tell you have cancer and observes for a month. Or that your significant other died in a car crash this morning. Or if someone claims they are suing you for a large amount of money. In all those cases, the person contacted may have a mental breakdown or worse.