(no subject)

[rivka]

I'm putting together a research proposal that, among other things, is going to involve an analysis of the emotional content of writing samples. I'm planning to use techniques that are developed by a Texas psychologist named James Pennebaker.

On his website, he's posted reprints of several of his research articles. I was scrolling through them, looking for titles which might be relevant to my study, when something I moused over brought up a URL in the status bar that contained the words "LiveJournal." Surprised, I looked up and saw the article title "Linguistic markers of psychological change surrounding September 11, 2001," and a note that they studied language use in 1000 LiveJournals for the period around September 11.

I felt an immediate surge of revulsion and violation. My stomach churned. All I could think was, "But I keep a LiveJournal." I was completely taken aback by the strength of the sense of utter violation.

It lasted until I got far enough into actually reading the article to realize that my LJ wasn't included in the sample. (They only included people who gave permission for their LJs to be spidered by web browsers. They didn't, however, individually ask people for permission to analyze their LJs.) Then it slowly subsided, especially as I realized that no one's journal was actually quoted. The negative emotions didn't dissipate entirely until I went on and read another article, a dry technical one.

Here's what I want to know: am I weird? Or does this seem like a violation of privacy, an intrusion, to anyone else?

Comments

[patgreene.livejournal.com]

No, you're not weird. It seemed intrusive to me, but then I remembered that these are essentially public documents. (Which is why most of my stuff is friends only these days.) Even recognizing that, it still feels a little creepy.

Also, looking at the paper....

[patgreene.livejournal.com]

I wonder if how the study group is affected by the exclusion of people who don't allow their journal to be spidered by web browsers. It probably would have no effect at all, but I think it's interesting to think about.

My $0.02

[thatwordgrrl.livejournal.com]

(keeping in mind that I don't allow my lj to be spidered)

If I had been included in that sample, I think I would have been happier with an individualized note detailing the methdology and hypothesis of the study.

One could argue, I suppose, that if you allow spidering, then you should expect that your journal will be used in such a fashion, but I would at least like to *know* if that is what they are doing.

That and 50 cents won't buy ya a cuppa joe, but there you are then...

[riarambles.livejournal.com]

I think they definitely ought to have emailed the owner of the journal to say "hey, we're studying you." I think notification is a must, even when you're studying things that are public for all intents and purposes, and especially in a case like LJ where it's very easy to notify the person.

[elusis.livejournal.com]

But then you have a Schroedinger's Cat problem: the observer changes the thing observed. I'd write differently if I knew someone were watching.

[elusis.livejournal.com]

But then you have a Schroedinger's Cat problem: the observer changes the thing observed. I'd write differently if I knew someone were watching. Someone other than my usual readers, that is.

[fairoriana.livejournal.com]

I think it's neat -- what an interesting study to basically get to watch the collective shift in people's thinking. I've never taken any social science, so I am not much indoctrinated in what is or is not appropriate behavior, but in many ways Livejournal is a unique and interesting collective of people's thinking. I'd be tempted if I were a researcher.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

I don't think you're weird. I've had similar discussions with people who wonder what the big deal is, why I'd have a sense of violation of privacy when really, these are public posts. But they're minein a sense that usenet posts aren't. They're all attached to my name, rather than being part of a group.

I don't allow my journal to be spidered. Sometimes I wish I did, because it means my journal's not (as?) searchable, but then I'm glad that it's not (as?) searchable to others because of my decision.

It's part of an ongoing discussion I've had with people about Native American artifacts. What feels like an intrusion, a violation, and what feels like science?

[lisajulie.livejournal.com]

I think it is interesting that you don't see usenet posts as being linked to you. But the news header contains who has posted it, and that is linkable back to your online identity.

Admittedly, it is harder to get a sense of _your_ content from usenet because the data points are distributed around in a number of news groups and threads in those news groups. But it would be doable.

I'll have to think some more about this (and prevent myself from looking into the technical side of extracting text from archived usenet news).

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

As someone who this exact thing happened to (it was a mailing list, not livejournal, but the subject matter was the same and the feelings of violation were as well), I think you're not at all weird for this. Reading my words from that time in an academic paper was a terrible slap in the face, especially since they were used without permission, and the person violating me was someone I knew.

In fact, according to Canadian academic standards, it would be illegal.

-J

[redbird]

What you describe would anger me as well. I don't know what US law on this is, but it certainly feels unethical.

I don't feel the same way about what rivka describes, for two reasons. One is that I have decided to let my journal be spidered [though that's the default option, and I suspect most people don't even realize there is an option until/unless they run into problems]. The other is that the researcher Rivka mentions didn't quote people's writing; for me, regardless of the name on it, the difference between "1000 LiveJournal users, including redbird, where studied, and we found thus-and-such aggregate results" and "On LiveJournal, redbird wrote $direct_quote_from_my_journal" is important.

I think I need to think more about this.

[lisajulie.livejournal.com]

Actually, no, it doesn't seem like a violation of privacy - especially as these were public posts (I assume) and the posters had allowed for a spider.

I don't put anything in LiveJournal that I wouldn't put in email that I wouldn't put on a postcard. Now, mind you, there isn't much going on in my personal life that is all that exciting. And I try to be _very_ careful about mentioning others so as to maintain their right to privacy.

This is, mostly, because I don't trust anything networked to be truly secure. Especially if I don't have control of the physical machine and connection (control freak? moi?).

A co-worker and I summed it up a while back "it's port 80, after all".

[trinker.livejournal.com]

It's...it's scattered, on Usenet. And I'm more prolific on Usenet. Or I used to. Someone who was just getting to know me did a google groups search on my nom.de.net and remarked "like trying to drink from a firehose". If you want to find out about me, you're going to have to work at it. And the conversations I had on Usenet were big group things.

Livejournal feels more intimate, and it's a fragile thing based on people not abusing that environment and making it feel unsafe. I don't put a great deal of specifically identifying information out, but it's far, far easier to get an aggregate image of me without trying very hard.

[rmjwell.livejournal.com]

I don't think you're weird because of this. I just don't share your feelings of revulsion and violation. I see the study --as you describe it above-- as an examination of statements recorded in a publically accessible forum.

To me I see no difference between what the researcher did and a "Hit the random button again" LJ browsing person does.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

It doesn't seem intrusive to me. It's just an efficient way to find personal writing on the web; everything they find is on the web, so it doesn't seem private to me at all. I'd be upset if they'd cracked the servers to get people's private posts, because that's rude and nasty, but anything in public is public, from my point of view.

For (possibly confusing) calibration: I felt very uncomfortable with Amazon's aggregate stats on "other people in your city bought this book", and haven't used them since. My journal tells spiders to go away and is not obviously connected to my legal identity. I posted stuff under my real name on Usenet, when I had time for any newsgroups.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

Huh. Amazon's data collection doesn't bug me much. Not the aggregate, anyway.

[elynne.livejournal.com]

... I suspect I'm more of an alien in this regard; I think it's tremendously nifty, and I kind of hope my journal was one of the ones they used, although it's statistically unlikely. It makes me want to go back and read my journal around that time period, and look for the markers they noted. I don't have any sense of violation of privacy whatsoever - I'm pleased that my journal might have been used for something positive, rather than somebody's personal vendetta or flame-bait.

Maybe that's part of why it doesn't bother me so much... I have had somebody comb through my journal looking for things to hurt me with. That felt like a violation; and I dealt with it by reminding myself that everybody else could see the same entries, and nobody else has felt the need to attack me like that.

Still... I can see why it would bother folks, as a kind of abstract thing. I'm very tempted to add a disclaimer to my user info along the lines of "If you want to use my journal to gather sociological information, by all means, feel free! But please let me know the results, as I find such studies utterly fascinating, and would like to see what comes of using my journal." :)

[eeyorerin]

I'm in a field that does/did a lot of online research. When I first started in this field, I remember that I felt very strongly against doing research in places where I socialized or otherwise had a life outside of grad school, and I hated having to read academic or popular articles about online places where I hung out because it felt like they were misrepresenting me personally even though I never appeared in them. The need to maintain this balance between "this is this thing I do that has nothing to do with being an academic" and "this is something that I do for school or for research" is really vital to my sanity, and when I find out that an online space where I express myself socially is an object of study (even though it's never surprising and I tend to limit my online habits accordingly) I always feel that same weird "but you're not supposed to study THAT" reaction.

In my dissertation, I haven't contacted people whose Web pages I've used as samples who were not directly in my study. The people in my study all signed informed consent forms and gave me permission regarding what to collect, and I redacted their names and identifying information out of any work of theirs I displayed. But when I needed samples from outside, I have been looking up pages that meet my criteria and citing them with attribution. My justification for this has always been that they're "publishing" material and I'm essentially citing it just as I would cite any other source of media. However, my conscience has always bothered me just a little. I think I'm afraid that if I write and ask them to let me use it, that they'll take it down or change it, and in some cases I can't find a contact address for the person who created the page. I think that when it comes time to prepare for publication I will probably re-think this strategy and ultimately write to them for permission.

So I don't think you're weird, and yet it's also tricky waters to navigate as someone who does online research and someone who's in the potential pool to be researched.

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

I have mixed feelings on this.

I am acutely aware of the fact that any public posts of mine are very much public - this is because I have parents, and they read the public posts but not the friends-only ones. Other people in my life (landlord, various former and current employers, potential parents-in-law) are also online and to an extent I make most of my posts friends-only to filter them out - I am comfortable with letting a complete stranger know I am struggling with, say, depression, but it would be unprofessional and possibly financially unwise to bring this to the attention of my piano students and/or their parents.

I think a short 'Is it okay if we study you?' could have skewed the research. People might have said 'yes' and then gone and hidden posts they hadn't previously thought about in those terms.

The posts are public. If you don't want something to be public then do not post it in a public place.

Having said that, I would be upset if someone specifically quoted me in such research without my permission. Perhaps I should put a copyright notice up on my journal.

[brooksmoses]

Putting up a copyright notice won't change a thing. It's already copyrighted upon being written (although the notice might make it a little easier to sue), but more importantly, copyright law specifically states that it is permissible under the "fair use" clause to quote an excerpt from someone else's copyrighted work for purposes of commenting on it. Your copyright -- that is, your right to control copying -- does not include having a legal right to prevent such excerpting, no matter how much legal boilerplate you include.

I think it's worth noting -- in context of this whole conversation, not just your comments -- that "publishing" something means putting the ideas that it contains in the public domain; anyone else can do whatever they want to with those ideas (so long as they don't infringe on your copyright regarding the words you used to express them), and they owe you nothing in return, aside from what's required by they ethical standards that they choose to adhere to, such as ones requiring citation of sources or requiring permission from research subjects in some circumstances.

My initial reaction that, if the idea of allowing the world (including psychological researchers) that freedom to your ideas about your private life causes you to feel unsettled, perhaps it's worth reconsidering whether you wish to grant them that freedom by publishing the ideas in the first place.

On the other hand, that's probably taking that a bit far; one can consider, for instance, that in email there is a cultural doctrine that it is deeply impolite to share someones private thoughts from a private email unless they make it clear that it's ok. Arguably, there's a similar cultural doctrine with regards to the privacy of Livejournal posts, even though they're publicly made. Unfortunately, with regards to Livejournal, this cultural doctrine is very much in formative stages, and it differs widely from one person to another....

(And I should stop now, before I'm late for this meeting. Sorry to stop sort of in the middle.)

[ailbhe]

Um, I tend to assume that everything I write online - email, pgp-encrypted or not - is thenceforth beyond my control. So it's possible for people to be *rude* about it, but it's not precisely a violation. I mean, I object to people peering in my windows if I've forgotten to close the curtains, but it's me who has forgotten to close the curtains, after all, and they're not actually coming *in* to my house without permission, just looking.

If someone repeatedly anonymously reposted extracts elsewhere, I'd treat that like someone who followed me around town harmlessly and regularly peered through my windows or letterbox. Bloody scary, and to be reported to the police, even if no actual harm came of it.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I guess I draw a distinction between me feeling violated and him committing a violation. He didn't break any rules or laws - I don't even think he violated the ethical principles for researchers. But I feel intruded upon in an emotionally upsetting way all the same.

If I had to label his actions, I'd agree with your choice of words: rude.

[marykaykare.livejournal.com]

I'm with elynne, I'd think it very cool if my LJ were used that way. It couldn't be mine though because I've only been at this a little over a year. With the exception of my family I can't think it would bother me for anyone to read what I post publicly and even to quote it. Putting it on the net, unlocked, is publishing it and I mostly lose control after that.

Of course, I no longer have a career to worry about, and I've been called an emotional exhibitionist, so I'm probably the one who's weird.

MKK

[kightp.livejournal.com]

I've never felt my LiveJournal was any more private, inherently, than anything else I put on the 'Net. Oh, yeah, I use the "private" filter sometimes for deeply personal noodling that really isn't meant for public consumption, and I wouldn't be thrilled if that stuff became public. But it's clear that some search engines ignore LJ's "block spiders" function, so I have to assume that it's possible anything I write here will turn up ... somewhere else ... without my knowledge or permission.

I'm not an especially private person, so this doesn't bother me much; if it did, I doubt I'd have started a LiveJournal.

By its nature, the Web is a pretty wide-open resource. That's what it was intended to be, and that's what it's become.

[firecat]

I can understand feeling violated over it, but I wouldn't personally feel that way. I don't think it's rude either. And from a practical point of view, if he informed people he was studying them, at least before he had finished studying them, it might affect the results. I can see where it would have been nice of him to send individual e-mails to the folks whose journals he studied, but for obvious reasons it's not exactly easy to extract those e-mail addresses, and I can understand why he didn't spend his research money on that grunt work.

I guess the question is: Is a LiveJournal a blog, or something else? To me, blogs are understood to be public speech. Individual LiveJournals are not necessarily public. But ones that are being spidered certainly seem to be equivalent to blogs.

[redbird]

What he could realistically have done was contacted people for permission after the study period. The paper acknowledges brad's help: it would certainly have been technically feasible to save the data, ask for permission, and then study only journals whose owners said yes. (Saving the data would solve the problem of having someone say yes and then go back and edit their journal because they know it was being studied.)

Also, I doubt there's any significant difference between users who hide their email addresses but would be willing to be subjects for something like this, and people who don't hide their email addresses and would be willing to be subjects. If you have the energy/cycles/grad students to analyze four months of the contents of over 1000 LiveJournals, you have the energy/cycles/grad students to send out a couple of thousand form emails asking for permission.

A thought

[lerryn.livejournal.com]

Would it have caused the same type of emotional reaction if the person analyzed several lettors to a newspaper editor, or the content of a website devoted to people discussing news?

Re: A thought

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Letters to the editor: no. People writing letters to the editor have their public presentation face on, and intend for the letter to be read by people who don't know them and don't give a damn about them.

Message board posts, well, it would depend. If it were a fairly impersonal board, like the ones some newspapers have, I would classify it in the "letters to the editor" category. If it were something that had become a close-knit community, I would feel that it was more of a personal intrusion.

I know that public LiveJournals are publicly available, and that anyone can read my public posts. That's clearly true in a technical sense. But it also seems obviously true to me that most people don't write their LJs for presentation to the general public - they write to an audience of people who know them. There's a difference between the technically possible audience and the expected/desired audience. I especially think that's true in moments of great grief and tragedy. People don't find themselves thinking, "anyone could read this" - they're reaching out to a community of people they know for support, and the public nature of the forum is only a dim consideration.

[nsingman.livejournal.com]

If they could somehow sample entries that were filtered or private, I'd consider it an intrusion and a violation of privacy. If the entries are public, then they're, well, public. No one has a right to any sort of privacy in a public place, or on a public forum - nor should they expect it.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Would you consider it ethical for a researcher to sit in a cafe, eavesdrop on conversations being held around her, and then analyze and publish the results without asking permission of the people being studied?

[tammylc.livejournal.com]

The first author on that paper (M. A. Cohn) is someone I sort of know, actually, and who's on my friends list. You want I should point him this way so he can comment?

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Oh, for heaven's sake.

I should've known that someone connected with the study was a LiveJournaller.

Um. Yeah, sure. But I would prefer that he not discuss my feelings about this with Pennebaker in any way that identifies me, including by my LJ name.

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

My own reaction was mild disappointment that my journal was not sampled (only US-based users were included), but I don't find it weird that others would feel differently.

[cheshyre]

Haven't read all the responses, but depending what was being studied, I might feel similarly upset and violated. I remember seeing an old study on rhetoric in soc.feminism, and my first reaction was to check whether any of my comments were being used.

I remember chatting with the people who did community-research at Lotus/IBM; I mentioned that Usenet and some of the internal discussion databases might make interesting fodder for research, and they pointed out the need for and difficulty of getting consent in such cases. What good is it to study a hundred+ message flamewar if you can't get consent from one crucial person...

[inhumandecency.livejournal.com]

er, hello... I didn't want to show up in public without talking to you first, but I haven't heard from you yet. Did you get the email I sent to your livejournal.com address a couple of weeks ago?

- Michael Cohn
(of Cohn, Mehl, & Pennebaker)