User information from Facebook and other social-media sites is invaluable to political and social scientists, but it must be treated with care
Mark Zuckerberg’s recent testimony to Congress was full of discussion about Facebook’s privacy policies, its advertising-driven business model and the issue of protecting of consumers around the globe. Equally as important, however, but less prominent in the public conversation, are some of the issues around trusting scholars to use people’s personal data from social media sites in an ethical way.
To understand political or social behavior today, scholars need access to private data. But in the case leading up to Zuckerberg’s hearing, a scholar collected data via a “third party application” that he developed, then sold those data to Cambridge Analytica, with unfortunate results. Given the importance of research review processes for institutions and the strict oversight by Institutional Review Boards (IRB) in the United States in particular, the Facebook case brings challenges of doing big data internet research into the spotlight.
Certainly, the Zuckerberg hearings centered around important topics (and provided a lot of congressional theater) but the implications for social science research are now in question. Researchers who have asked for access to large datasets in order to know more about our digital lives are concerned about how tech companies will change their policies. Facebook, for example, has hesitated to share data with social scientists who have questions about political opinions, interpersonal behavior, group networks and digital life.
We have known for a long time that digital technologies have seriously impacted all kinds of scientific inquiry, but managing the oversight of data collection in a digital world has become much more complex over time. Historically social data, in the form of surveys or transcripts of interviews, were collected with informed consent, then stored on paper in a locked file cabinet.
With the onset of online surveys, datasets were stored instead on password-protected or encrypted computers. Now the emergence of cloud computing is changing data management yet again, and we have to trust a cloud provider to protect the data. It is difficult to see how recent shifts in IRB policy take into full account the magnitude of protection needed to protect research participants of all kinds.
In fact, recent changes to the federal policy in the United States were the first revisions in decades, excluding guidelines for human protections in data science, and actually seem to have relaxed existing standards for protecting research participants. These changes to the federal policy include an expanded list of the kinds of research that are exempt from full IRB review, a broadened reach of consent for secondary data use, and the need to gain IRB approval at each research site as opposed to single-IRB coverage for multisite studies.
The post In a Big Data World, Scholars Need New Guidelines for Research appeared first on Statii News.
source http://news.statii.co.uk/in-a-big-data-world-scholars-need-new-guidelines-for-research/
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