Three Harvard sociologists have an article coming out in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on the influences of tastes in a cohort of university students over their four years at…wait for it…Harvard. They utilized Facebook data to conduct their research. But when the data was initially released in 2008 (a condition of federal funding for the project), the university wasn’t identified. The researchers mistakenly assumed that the data could remain anonymized. They were quickly proven wrong.
This study also raised a bit of a ruckus about six months ago due to this and other concerns that the privacy of the student data was not effectively protected. Amongst the concerns was that student assistants at Harvard had access to the data as part of their work supporting the sociologists. The students whose profiles were used were not informed of the collection or the use of their data for research purposes. Now, the data collection did begin before Facebook developed protocol for researchers interested in using their data. Officials at the service indicate the project, as the Harvard researchers conducted it, would not likely happen the same way if it started today.
That does not necessarily mean that the concerns unique to social network research have been effectively addressed. I am typically in favor of transparency, open access, and otherwise making data widely available. That does not mean the rights and concerns of human subjects in such research can be overlooked. That there’s little discussion of the issue in light of the research article concerns me.
Pasco Phronesis 