6.2 Data security & ethics (2): Yes…

• Data is valuable and traded
  • Value of data (2015)
  • e.g. Medical records (Breaches on the rise)
• Both your personal but also research data could be…
  • …stolen, lost (errors, neglect) or destroyed.
• More common than we think… (think of unreported cases, haveibeenpwned.com)
• Data Re-Identification
  • Robust de-anonymization of large sparse datasets
  • Companies/researchers apparently did not realize that back then…
  • New York Times: Privacy Project; Twelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero Privacy
• Ethics: But the Data Is Already Public (Zimmer 2010)⁴
• Breached data used in research (Panama paper, Iraq war logs, Scheherazade)

References

Zimmer, Michael. 2010. “‘But the Data Is Already Public’: On the Ethics of Research in Facebook.” Ethics Inf. Technol. 12 (4): 313–25.

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4. Abstract: In 2008, a group of researchers publicly released profile data collected from the Facebook accounts of an entire cohort of college students from a US university. While good-faith attempts were made to hide the identity of the institution and protect the privacy of the data subjects, the source of the data was quickly identified, placing the privacy of the students at risk. Using this incident as a case study, this paper articulates a set of ethical concerns that must be addressed before embarking on future research in social networking sites, including the nature of consent, properly identifying and respecting expectations of privacy on social network sites, strategies for data anonymization prior to public release, and the relative expertise of institutional review boards when confronted with research projects based on data gleaned from social media.↩︎