Hacker News Reader

Comment by geekster777 | Hacker News Reader

I think lying is a reasonably fundamental part of human research, or at least obfuscation. You don't tell the participants what you're testing for, since you don't want the results to be biased, and often obfuscate what you're measuring.

I think the real ethical issue is actually that the email reads like it's coming from a lawyer. It's weirdly formal and cites that a response is legally required within 45 days. As other comments have mentioned, this has the real world consequence of heavy stress where most folks would (and should) lawyer up. This is the biggest ethical issue, since the study is costing its participants nontrivial money, and without consent.

View on HN

Lying is a reasonably fundamental part of research, but lying to humans can hurt them in various ways, and that's why we have human research ethics rules and standards that require an explicit process for obtaining consent to do something, even if we can't say what in advance, and debriefing and harm mitigation.

Which the IRB missed because they didn't understand that, to ask questions about a website's policy, you must get an answer from a human.

That’s _not_ how it works. The fact that information comes from a human does not make something a human subject experiment. The information has to be about a human. Here the information is about a process for handling CCPA requests. We can argue about whether, in a single site operator case that also qualifies as information about a human since there’s no clear organizational policy, but I want to make it clear that information simply coming from a human does not make an experiment a human subject experiment.

> The fact that information comes from a human does not make something a human subject experiment. The information has to be about a human.

The experiment is collecting more information than just survey results about CCPA policies. They're also collecting and evaluating information about how humans respond to their legal threats vs how they respond to less pointed inquiries from academics. If this study was merely ordinary survey methodology with questions that aren't asking about humans, it wouldn't be human subject research. But they have actually gone outside the bounds of a mere survey with the deception and threats.

So what I find fascinating in the academic sense is that the law is being followed naturally here and so any costs incurred are incidental and arguably not the result of this experiment but rather actually the result of the law existing in the first place so ethically it’s not clear to me whether the experiment is creating this stress or in fact the law and modern society itself creates this new possibility of stress. If it’s a problem that lawyers can get involved in response to request for information about a possible CCPA request, then perhaps the law needs rework so that it cant be construed so easily as some threat requiring you to lawyer up.

In short, if lawyers asking people to follow laws are an ethical problem, then maybe we need to address that and not get enraged about a totally legal request for information about a website’s CCPA process.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com