Me and common sense. I don't believe consent is relevant when there is no risk of harm to the subject. IRBs and the GDPR are overly aggressive on this point, probably as a reaction to real and important violations of privacy. But the idea that A/B testing the color of your CTA button on a landing page requires informed consent is absurd.
A/B testing on major platforms is much more sophisticated than that[1].
It's a crucial practice for advertisers and marketing teams that dives deep into researching the psychological response towards images, text and dozens of other variables. Human subjects are acting as lab rats in order to extract some data points to drive the next test and campaign.
So, yes, it should definitely require informed consent and opting in.
On some it is, and some it isn't.
> It's a crucial practice for advertisers and marketing teams that dives deep into researching the psychological response towards images, text and dozens of other variables. Human subjects are acting as lab rats in order to extract some data points to drive the next test and campaign.
This is just a long and emotionally laden way of saying "changing images and text to see which works best".
> So, yes, it should definitely require informed consent and opting in.
Guess we're just going to have to agree to disagree then. I don't see any reason whatsoever to think that this practice is harmful to the subjects being experimented on.
At worst, it's harmful to society in general because it incentivizes consumerism and potentially self destructive behavior. But that is completely orthogonal to the issue of informed consent. If you got perfectly informed consent from 10,000 people to tease out the perfect pitch text, and then deployed it against the rest of the population, the effect would be exactly the same, whether or not you got consent.
Of course there are. But what specifically are the harms that are going to be caused by either this research or a landing page A/B test without a click through pop up? The existence of theoretical harms for broad categories of potential research does not have a whole lot of bearing on these specific lines of research.
> If you're interested why these ethical principles exist in the United States, I suggest you at least skim the Belmont Report
I read it. It was interesting, but I don't think it's particularly relevant here. The only prong of its test that would be relevant to this experiment is "respect for persons". The idea that somehow not revealing the bug or the experiment was intrinsically harmful as a violation of a person's moral autonomy.
I don't buy that line of reasoning, and I can't really think of any valid consequentialist justification for it, and the report itself does not attempt to justify it either, as far as I can tell.
It's just a scammy move at best. To me it's borderline criminal to sabotage a project like that.