Getting “informed consent” is one of the big, guiding principles for research done on humans. My guess is the author deliberately used that language of the scientific community, to make clear that they did not agree to be part of the research.
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?