Search for: All records

Social media provides unique opportunities for researchers to learn about a variety of phenomena—it is often publicly available, highly accessible, and affords more naturalistic observation. However, as research using social media data has increased, so too has public scrutiny, highlighting the need to develop ethical approaches to social media data use. Prior work in this area has explored users’ perceptions of researchers’ use of social media data in the context of a single platform. In this paper, we expand on that work, exploring how platforms and their affordances impact how users feel about social media data reuse. We present results from three factorial vignette surveys, each focusing on a different platform—dating apps, Instagram, and Reddit—to assess users’ comfort with research data use scenarios across a variety of contexts. Although our results highlight different expectations between platforms depending on the research domain, purpose of research, and content collected, we find that the factor with the greatest impact across all platforms is consent—a finding which presents challenges for big data researchers. We conclude by offering a sociotechnical approach to ethical decision-making. This approach provides recommendations on how researchers can interpret and respond to platform norms and affordances to predict potential data use sensitivities. The approach also recommends that researchers respond to the predominant expectation of notification and consent for research participation by bolstering awareness of data collection on digital platforms. 

The 2012 Menlo Report was an effort in which a group of computer scientists, US government funders, and lawyers produced ethics guidelines for research in information and communications technology (ICT). Here we study Menlo as a case of what we call ethics governance in the making, finding that this process examines past controversies and enrols existing networks to connect the everyday practice of ethics with ethics as a form of governance. To create the Menlo Report, authors and funders relied on bricolage work with existing, available resources, which significantly shaped both the report’s contents and impacts. Report authors were motivated by both forward- and backward-looking goals: enabling new data-sharing as well as addressing past controversies and their implications for the field’s body of research. Authors also grappled with uncertainty about which ethical frameworks were appropriate and made the decision to classify much network data as human subjects data. Finally, the Menlo Report authors attempted to enrol multiple existing networks in governance through appeals to local research communities as well as taking steps towards federal rulemaking. The Menlo Report serves as a case study in how to study ethics governance in the making: with attention to resources, adaptation, and bricolage, and with a focus on both the uncertainties the process tries to repair, as well as the new uncertainties the process uncovers, which will become the site of future ethics work.

 

Lessons from the recent past. 

Research using online datasets from social media platforms continues to grow in prominence, but recent research suggests that platform users are sometimes uncomfortable with the ways their posts and content are used in research studies. While previous research has suggested that a variety of contextual variables may influence this discomfort, such factors have yet to be isolated and compared. In this article, we present results from a factorial vignette survey of American Facebook users. Findings reveal that researcher domain, content type, purpose of data use, and awareness of data collection all impact respondents’ comfort—measured via judgments of acceptability and concern—with diverse data uses. We provide guidance to researchers and ethics review boards about the ways that user reactions to research uses of their data can serve as a cue for identifying sensitive data types and uses. 

Frequent public uproar over forms of data science that rely on information about people demonstrates the challenges of defining and demonstrating trustworthy digital data research practices. This paper reviews problems of trustworthiness in what we term pervasive data research: scholarship that relies on the rich information generated about people through digital interaction. We highlight the entwined problems of participant unawareness of such research and the relationship of pervasive data research to corporate datafication and surveillance. We suggest a way forward by drawing from the history of a different methodological approach in which researchers have struggled with trustworthy practice: ethnography. To grapple with the colonial legacy of their methods, ethnographers have developed analytic lenses and researcher practices that foreground relations of awareness and power. These lenses are inspiring but also challenging for pervasive data research, given the flattening of contexts inherent in digital data collection. We propose ways that pervasive data researchers can incorporate reflection on awareness and power within their research to support the development of trustworthy data science. 

Abstract There is growing consensus that teaching computer ethics is important, but there is little consensus on how to do so. One unmet challenge is increasing the capacity of computing students to make decisions about the ethical challenges embedded in their technical work. This paper reports on the design, testing, and evaluation of an educational simulation to meet this challenge. The privacy by design simulation enables more relevant and effective computer ethics education by letting students experience and make decisions about common ethical challenges encountered in real-world work environments. This paper describes the process of incorporating empirical observations of ethical questions in computing into an online simulation and an in-person board game. We employed the Values at Play framework to transform empirical observations of design into a playable educational experience. First, we conducted qualitative research to discover when and how values levers—practices that encourage values discussions during technology development—occur during the design of new mobile applications. We then translated these findings into gameplay elements, including the goals, roles, and elements of surprise incorporated into a simulation. We ran the online simulation in five undergraduate computer and information science classes. Based on this experience, we created a more accessible board game, which we tested in two undergraduate classes and two professional workshops. We evaluated the effectiveness of both the online simulation and the board game using two methods: a pre/post-test of moral sensitivity based on the Defining Issues Test, and a questionnaire evaluating student experience. We found that converting real-world ethical challenges into a playable simulation increased student’s reported interest in ethical issues in technology, and that students identified the role-playing activity as relevant to their technical coursework. This demonstrates that roleplaying can emphasize ethical decision-making as a relevant component of technical work. 

While the ethics of technology is analyzed across disciplines from science and technology studies (STS), engineering, computer science, critical management studies, and law, less attention is paid to the role that frms and managers play in the design, development, and dissemination of technology across communities and within their frm. Although frms play an important role in the development of technology, and make associated value judgments around its use, it remains open how we should understand the contours of what frms owe society as the rate of technological development accelerates. We focus here on digital technologies: devices that rely on rapidly accelerating digital sensing, storage, and transmission capabilities to intervene in human processes. This symposium focuses on how frms should engage ethical choices in developing and deploying these technologies. In this introduction, we, frst, identify themes the symposium articles share and discuss how the set of articles illuminate diverse facets of the intersection of technology and business ethics. Second, we use these themes to explore what business ethics ofers to the study of technology and, third, what technology studies ofers to the feld of business ethics. Each feld brings expertise that, together, improves our understanding of the ethical implications of technology. Finally we introduce each of the fve papers, suggest future research directions, and interpret their implications for business ethics.