LinkedIn relied on its user agreement to gain consent to research millions of users.

A Maryland professor created software that can read people’s personalities and “predict their behavior” for tech giant Alibaba, documents obtained by The Daily Beast show.

When data broker SafeGraph got caught selling location information on Planned Parenthood visitors, it had a public relations trick up its sleeve. After the company agreed to remove family planning center data from its platforms in response to public outcry, CEO Auren Hoffman tried to flip the...

<blockquote>Chancellor Barnhart and President Reif should jointly apologize to the MIT community as a whole and HMS participants in particular for any pain or distress related to the study or actions informed by the study.</blockquote>

In 1966, Henry Beecher published his foundational paper “Ethics and Clinical Research,” bringing to light unethical experiments that were routinely being conducted by leading universities and government agencies. A common theme was the lack of voluntary consent. Research regulations surrounding laboratory experiments flourished after his work. More than half a century later, we seek to follow in his footsteps and identify a new domain of risk to the public: certain types of field experiments. The nature of experimental research has changed greatly since the Belmont Report. Due in part to technological advances including social media, experimenters now target and affect whole societies, releasing interventions into a living public, often without sufficient review or controls. A large number of social science field experiments do not reflect compliance with current ethical and legal requirements that govern research with human participants. Real-world interventions are being conducted without consent or notice to the public they affect. Follow-ups and debriefing are routinely not being undertaken with the populations that experimenters injure. Importantly, even when ethical research guidelines are followed, researchers are following principles developed for experiments in controlled settings, with little assessment or protection for the wider societies within which individuals are embedded. We strive to improve the ethics of future work by advocating the creation of new norms, illustrating classes of field experiments where scholars do not appear to have recognized the ways such research circumvents ethical standards by putting people, including those outside the manipulated group, into harm’s way.  There are no data underlying this work.

"relatively few papers mention ethics and privacy issues, or apply strategies to address ethical issues"

Its most-viewed link in Q1 cast doubt about the COVID-19 vaccine

Research using online datasets from social media platforms continues to grow in prominence, but recent research suggests that platform users are sometimes uncom...

Artificial intelligence (AI) research is routinely criticized for its real and potential impacts on society, and we lack adequate institutional responses to this criticism and to the...

It all started with an email.

Embarrassed overreaction or righteous indignation? An academic research group has provoked the Linux crew to ban their whole university!