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Should Internet Researchers Use Ill-Gotten Information?

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Abstract

This paper describes how the ethical problems raised by scientific data obtained through harmful and immoral conduct (which, following Stan Godlovitch, is called ill-gotten information) may also emerge in cases where data is collected from the Internet. It describes the major arguments for and against using ill-gotten information in research, and shows how they may be applied to research that either collects information about the Internet itself or which uses data from questionable or unknown sources on the Internet. Three examples (the Internet Census 2012, the PharmaLeaks study, and research into keylogger dropzones) demonstrate how researchers address the ethical issues raised by the sources of data that they use and how the existing arguments concerning the use of ill-gotten information apply to Internet research. The problems faced by researchers who collect or use data from the Internet are shown to be the same problems faced by researchers in other fields who may obtain or use ill-gotten information.

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Notes

  1. I thank an anonymous reviewer for emphasizing this point. However, Poor and Davidson (2016) note that the ethics statement of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) did not directly address their problem.

  2. Godlovich (1997) makes this analogy explicit.

  3. In contrast to the honouring the victims argument, Mostow (1993) compellingly argues that deliberately refusing to use ill-gotten information is itself an important memorial that recognises the suffering of those harmed by it.

  4. I thank Brandt van der Gaast for this point.

  5. This is particularly true for information found on the so-called ‘Deep Web’ that is not indexed and accessible by search engines.

  6. Anonymising data is also generally a condition for permissible secondary information use (El Eman and Arbuckle 2013).

  7. The creator claims that the botnet was named ‘Carna’ after a Roman goddess, as there is “somewhat of a tradition to name bots after Roman or Greek divinities” (Carna Botnet n.d.).

  8. There is a remote possibility that the software could cause a device to crash, which might lead to harm if anyone is dependent on it. There is no evidence that this occurred.

  9. Besides sending spam email, botnets are also used to perform Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on websites.

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Acknowledgements

I thank my colleagues at the University of Twente for their helpful comments on a previous version of this paper. I also thank Aimee van Wynsberghe for first directing me towards the Internet Census 2012 as an ethical problem, and the two anonymous reviewers and the editor of Science and Engineering Ethics for their helpful comments and suggestions.

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    David M. Douglas

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Douglas, D.M. Should Internet Researchers Use Ill-Gotten Information?. Sci Eng Ethics 24, 1221–1240 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-017-9935-x

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