Ethical Considerations when Employing Fake Identities in Online Social Networks for Research

• Published in: Science and engineering ethics Vol. 20; no. 4; pp. 1027 - 1043
• Main Authors: Elovici, Yuval, Fire, Michael, Herzberg, Amir, Shulman, Haya
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.12.2014; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Alternating current; Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering; Computer information security; Confidentiality - ethics; Data collection; Deception; Education; Engineering; Ethics; Ethics, Research; False identification; Guidelines; Humans; Identification (Psychology); Joints; Medicine/Public Health; Morals; Online; Original Paper; Philosophy; Philosophy of Science; Privacy; Records as Topic; Research Design; Research ethics; Security; Social interactions; Social Media; Social networks; Social organization; Social research; Social Sciences - ethics; Social Support; Taxonomy; Texts; Ethics; Data mining; Online social network; Fake profile
• ISSN: 1353-3452; 1471-5546; 1471-5546
• DOI: 10.1007/s11948-013-9473-0

Online social networks (OSNs) have rapidly become a prominent and widely used service, offering a wealth of personal and sensitive information with significant security and privacy implications. Hence, OSNs are also an important—and popular—subject for research. To perform research based on real-life evidence, however, researchers may need to access OSN data, such as texts and files uploaded by users and connections among users. This raises significant ethical problems. Currently, there are no clear ethical guidelines, and researchers may end up (unintentionally) performing ethically questionable research, sometimes even when more ethical research alternatives exist. For example, several studies have employed “fake identities” to collect data from OSNs, but fake identities may be used for attacks and are considered a security issue. Is it legitimate to use fake identities for studying OSNs or for collecting OSN data for research? We present a taxonomy of the ethical challenges facing researchers of OSNs and compare different approaches. We demonstrate how ethical considerations have been taken into account in previous studies that used fake identities. In addition, several possible approaches are offered to reduce or avoid ethical misconducts. We hope this work will stimulate the development and use of ethical practices and methods in the research of online social networks.