MichaelZimmer.org

Last week I attended Internet Research 11.0: Sustainability, Participation, Action, the 11th annual  conference for the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), in Gothenburg, Sweden. This is the conference I look forward to the most each year, thanks to the steady stream of stimulating presentations by both young and established Internet scholars, and the opportunity to [...]

On Wednesday, July 21, 2010, I will be presenting in front of the Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections (SACHRP), part of the Office for Human Research Protections in the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). My presentation will focus on how Web 2.0 tools, environments, and experiences are creating new conceptual gaps in our understanding of privacy, anonymity/identifiability, consent, and harm.

Recently I’ve found myself absorbed in various issues surrounding Internet research ethics: the Tastes, Ties, and Time Facebook data release, Pete Warden’s plans to release a database of public Facebook information on 215 million users, etc. To help work through some of these issues — and assist others who are much more qualified than I [...]

Anthony Hoffmann, a UW-Milwaukee School of Information Studies PhD student, has posted an excellent analysis of the Twitter-Library of Congress deal, in 4 parts, at his blog: Part I: Intro and Privacy Roundup: Hoffmann discusses how the LoC acquisition of the public Twitter archive “directly confronts a number of unresolved (and hotly contested) practical and [...]

Speaking of the research ethics related to automatically harvesting public social networking data, we are confronted this week with the story of Pete Warden, a former Apple engineer who has spent the last six months harvesting and analyzing data from some 215 million public Facebook profile pages. According to Warden, he exploited a flaw in [...]

While participating in the workshop on Revisiting Research Ethics in the Facebook Era: Challenges in Emerging CSCW Research, the question arose as to whether it was ethical for researchers to follow and systematically capture public Twitter streams without first obtaining specific, informed consent by the subjects. Many in the room felt that consent was not [...]

I’m currently in Savannah, GA to participate in a workshop on Revisiting Research Ethics in the Facebook Era: Challenges in Emerging CSCW Research at CSCW 2010. This is my first time at CSCW, and looking at the set of papers for this workshop, it should be an excellent experience. I’ve submitted a brief analysis of [...]

For the last 353 days, I’ve been part of a team planning Internet Research 10.0 – Internet: Critical, the 10th annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR). My life is about to get back to normal, as an interdisciplinary collection of nearly 400 scholars, researchers and graduate students interested in Internet and new [...]

Congratulations to Elizabeth Buchanan and Charles Ess for being awarded an NSF grant to create a much-needed repository and advisory board to address the challenges that emerging Internet and Web 2.0 platforms are placing on research ethics. I’m thrilled to be among the senior personnel on this grant, and look forward to the collaboration and [...]

I’ve returned from the 8th International Conference of Computer Ethics: Philosophical Enquiry in Corfu, Greece, where I presented an early draft of a paper based on my critique of the “Taste, Ties, and Time” Facebook data release. The paper was well-received, but I have work ahead of me to improve the manuscript prior to publication. [...]