There seem to be a very few high-profile cases around which the discourse of Internet research ethics has been based. There’s ‘A Rape in Cyberspace’ which Julian Dibbell wrote up in Village Voice in 1993. This has all sorts of ramifications but, from the point of view of research ethics, the message is – these are real people in cyberspace, and they can be harmed.

Then there’s the case of JennyMUSH, a form of MUD populated by survivors of sexual abuse. From a research ethics point of view, it’s not so much what happened in JennyMUSH, as the way that it then became a honeypot for researchers, with the result that it then became a much less safe place for participants to be. 

The Carnegie-Mellon cyberporn study became a big issue because of all the publicity it got – it was originally an unethical piece of research carried out by an undergraduate. He used deception to access private data to study usage of pornography on the Internet. Any ethical monitoring whatsoever would have knocked this study on the head – I’m not sure that it needed any new Internet rules to be introduced.

So, on the back of these three cases, we have a proliferation of ethical rules and codes and musings. I think it’s significant that the cases have connections to rape, to abuse and to (child and other) pornography. The bigger crimes – which have nothing to do with research ethics – are used to flavour the research ethics debate which leads, perhaps, to overkill. 

Otherwise, we have anecdotal evidence of people getting annoyed by researchers, but that’s about it. Some people began to feel less secure and more overlooked in their online world – but it could be argued that that’s a good thing, they now have a more accurate perspective on how cyberspace operates.

I’m struggling with the ethics of Internet research at the moment, which is more complicated than you might think. Depending on how you conceptualise the Internet, you need to apply different forms of ethical thinking.

If you view the Internet as a virtual space populated by human actors, then you need a human subject approach to ethics, with informed consent a big issue. If, on the other hand, you see the Internet as an accumulation of texts, then your concern is with data protection, copyright and intellectual property rights.

Blogs and newspapers may highlight this dilemma. A newspaper is in the public domain – you can research it as much as you like, unless you appropriate so much of it for yourself that you breach copyright. A blog, on the other hand, can be viewed as an online persona. It’s in the public domain, but it may have been written primarily for family or friends.

On the other hand, a blog may have been written to publicise a version of the news. To treat it as a person means limiting your study of it, and thus privileging the version of the news put out by a large or multinational company. Thus, ethically speaking, some blogs should be treated as manifestations of online identity and others should be treated as public-domain texts. But which blogs are which?