The ethical abyss of big data research

When learning was still a predominantly human undertaking. "If a dataset can be downloaded from the web, regardless of whether it originated from a breach or other illegal activity, it is considered to be in the public domain and falls under the IRB exemption for public domain datasets." This is only one of many staggering assessments Kalev Leetaru got in response to his requests to data scientists and researchers, universities, research institutions, and research funders, asking them to elaborate on how they assured that their use of big data sets were ethically tenable. Leetaru, Senior Fellow at the George Washington University Center for Cyber & Homeland Security, was confronted with a plethora of answers – almost all explaining why the addressed would be unable to explain their reasoning. All this at a time when a number of high profile studies had to be retracted after publication in reaction to a firestorm of criticism by other researchers (who have a more accurate ethical compass, apparently).