[0] The irony that the whole problem is based on wording that implies a lawsuit is not lost on me.
Righteous indignation over something like this is dangerous, not least because it can lead to science being much harder (more bureaucratic and more expensive) to do by all scientists. “More oversight” or “dissolve the irb” all put too much responsibility on the institution.
Sometimes, we should just blame the people who did something rude and stupid not the institution.
There have been multiple examples of this going horribly, horribly wrong. (Naturally, the worst examples were government-funded and ran during the Cold War.)
As a society, we have since concluded that at bare minimum, people should know they are being experimented on--and even that isn't enough to stop things from going badly.
This is why the IRB exists in the first place. A major part of its purpose is to prevent this sort of thing from causing undue harm, i.e., by forcing people with limited incomes to seek legal counsel because they believe they're about to be sued into the ground. One of the rules generally agreed upon for this is that experiments with human test subjects must inform those humans up-front what they're getting into.
To say that the response to this "can lead to science being much harder" is an ethically wrong defense. We know it makes certain kinds of research harder; that's the point. There are certain kinds of research that directly harm their subjects, and we don't do that to people. More than that, people have a right to decide whether they want to be involved in a study, as they may personally feel endangered by it (i.e., someone who has a PTSD response to being sued may not want to deal with being fake-sued).
To say that calls to dissolve the IRB "put too much responsibility on the institution" is flat-out false. This IS the IRB's responsibility--they approve or reject studies like this specifically to avoid ethical problems like this one. To claim that this isn't the IRB's responsibility is like claiming that it's not the responsibility of the law to revoke a driver's license when someone has been driving drunk, or that it's not the responsibility of the Food and Drug Administration to reject approval for foods that contain dangerous contaminants.
So, to reframe this: "can you think of scenarios where institutional oversight could cause negative harms on society?" There are tradeoffs in ethical domains —and usually a lot of work has been done to find a middle ground.
Further, the study would still have worked if the researchers had simply asked for the information as researchers, instead of lying about their identity and making thinly-veiled threats of legal action if the subject doesn't comply.
I apologize for assuming that you were defending the study; I figured that was the topic of conversation, after all.
If there is nuance, but it does not apply to this situation, then it is worth saying that this nuance does not apply to this situation--so that I'm less likely to misinterpret what you're saying.
Ethical action involves nuance! It is very comforting to think that the world is black and white, good and bad. But it isn’t. Why is this so difficult to communicate?
By my estimation it is real, the proprietorship (who I like and appreciate personally, and I think are operating on good faith) of this community has often made noises about how it should be better. It's not, and it should be.
So yeah, pretty sure it's that. I almost never get harassed by people who think I'm cis male, the bulk of the harassment came from people who thought I was transmasc.
Probably the furry stuff too, which is honestly sort of terrifying, do these people not know how much infrastructure relies on stressed and overworked furries?
So what happens when a site receives a CCPA inquiry from an actual person concerned about privacy instead of a researcher under a fake identity? The site still needs to determine if the law applies to them and if so what they must do to satisfy their obligations, so a real inquiry should be as costly and as stressful as a research inquiry.
Does this suggest that privacy laws such as CCPA (and GDPR) which create obligations for sites to deal directly with users on privacy matters are a bad idea? Should such laws instead require users to go through some state agency as an intermediary which would then only contact the site on behalf of the person if the agency determines that the user's data at the site is covered?
They conclude that it's a Princeton research study and throw it in the trash.
This is part of the harm this study has done; because the researchers were not upfront about who they were and what they were doing, they have introduced uncertainty about the CCPA process.
> Should such laws instead require users to go through some state agency as an intermediary which would then only contact the site on behalf of the person if the agency determines that the user's data at the site is covered?
That could be a good idea. It would depend, of course, on that agency being well-staffed and well-trained (both of which are separate from being well-funded, which can help). There's a giant pile of messy problems that can crop up due to negative influences from, say, corporations that want to sell more data.
That said, it would be nice to have an org that can do the minimum legal work necessary to figure out if the claimant has a leg to stand on. That would not only minimize the harm of this sort of ill-advised study, but also make it harder to use threats of legal force to coerce smaller site owners.
You don't get out much, do you?
I've known tons of lawyers that won't look at their watch and tell you the time, unless they get a tenner from it. To be fair, they are used to folks trying to extract highly valuable services from them, for free, so it's sort of a defense mechanism.
I have (and have had) many friends that are lawyers. A few will help me out with quick consults for free. I even have one chap that has gone beyond that, and I'm grateful. I'm quite aware of the value of their services, and always offer (and am willing) to pay; even if they decline to invoice me.
This creates even more incentives to have a paywall--one, it keeps people from bugging you for free legal advice that can bite them and you in the ass later, and two, it ensures that the people who do get advice from you have followed your procedures for setting up an account with you.