Using Empirical Data to Reason about Internet Ethics

Using Empirical Data to Reason about Internet Research Ethics

Internet technology holds significant potential to respond to business, educational, and social needs, but this same technology poses fundamentally new challenges for research ethics. To reason about ethical questions, researchers and ethics review boards typically rely on dichotomies like “public” versus “private,” “published” vs. “unpublished,” and “anonymous” vs. “identified.” However, online, these categories are blurred, and the underlying concepts require reinterpretation. How then are we to reason about ethical dilemmas about research on the Internet? To date, most work in this area has been grounded in a combination of theoretical analysis and experience gained by people in the course of conducting Internet research.

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