There’s an interesting issue of scale here. An individual Tweet, say, has a precise, personal, social context, but that context is immaterial when it is part of a database of a billion Tweets with a million different contexts. Or is it? The relationship between the individual datum and the aggregate of data is a difficult one to figure out, especially when you’re talking ethics instead of epistemology.
All I know is, there’s a lot of interesting research that will not and cannot be done if you have to get the “permission” of every person who contributes text (or any kind of information) to a database. If this were the ethics enforced from the beginning of the new media era, we wouldn’t have a lot of cool things. I wouldn’t have a Natural Language Toolkit to play with!
There’s an ends/means issue here, too. The ridiculous thing about the Henrietta Lacks case or the more recent John Moore case is that if the doctors had asked their permission, they probably would have said yes. Then again, they might have said no. They say no, maybe there’s no polo vaccine or any of the other hundreds of cool things that Lacks’ and Moore’s cells have contributed to.
Kim’s overall argument is not especially convincing to me, though clearly there is a disconnect between some users’ expectations of privacy and the type of privacy that is afforded to them by law or contractual arrangement. No matter what lines we draw, there will always be unethical acts, so pointing to examples of allegedly unethical research isn’t necessarily a convincing argument that the line is in the wrong place. However Twitter isn’t like Times Square. It’s more like the mall, a privately-owned space you may enter upon agreement to certain conditions. The analogy between things we say or write and our bodies is unfortunate. I can dissect what Kim says without her permission. I can’t dissect her body without permission.
I suppose my inclination is to move in the opposite direction from Kim’s effort to equate texts with bodies, to attenuate further the relationship between texts and the human bodies that participate in the production of those texts.
Seth
November 16, 2014 4:41 pmThere’s an interesting issue of scale here. An individual Tweet, say, has a precise, personal, social context, but that context is immaterial when it is part of a database of a billion Tweets with a million different contexts. Or is it? The relationship between the individual datum and the aggregate of data is a difficult one to figure out, especially when you’re talking ethics instead of epistemology.
All I know is, there’s a lot of interesting research that will not and cannot be done if you have to get the “permission” of every person who contributes text (or any kind of information) to a database. If this were the ethics enforced from the beginning of the new media era, we wouldn’t have a lot of cool things. I wouldn’t have a Natural Language Toolkit to play with!
There’s an ends/means issue here, too. The ridiculous thing about the Henrietta Lacks case or the more recent John Moore case is that if the doctors had asked their permission, they probably would have said yes. Then again, they might have said no. They say no, maybe there’s no polo vaccine or any of the other hundreds of cool things that Lacks’ and Moore’s cells have contributed to.
Alex Reid
November 21, 2014 10:36 amKim’s overall argument is not especially convincing to me, though clearly there is a disconnect between some users’ expectations of privacy and the type of privacy that is afforded to them by law or contractual arrangement. No matter what lines we draw, there will always be unethical acts, so pointing to examples of allegedly unethical research isn’t necessarily a convincing argument that the line is in the wrong place. However Twitter isn’t like Times Square. It’s more like the mall, a privately-owned space you may enter upon agreement to certain conditions. The analogy between things we say or write and our bodies is unfortunate. I can dissect what Kim says without her permission. I can’t dissect her body without permission.
I suppose my inclination is to move in the opposite direction from Kim’s effort to equate texts with bodies, to attenuate further the relationship between texts and the human bodies that participate in the production of those texts.