(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.

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.

[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?

[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

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.

[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".

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

That's true, about the direct quotes. If my words had simply been included in statistics, I don't think it would have bothered me at all. But I was quoted directly in a very long passage, and *named by pseudonym* (and keep in mind, my pseudonym is far more "well known" out there in the world than my legal name!). I found the whole thing extremely upsetting.

-J

[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.

[thatwordgrrl.livejournal.com]

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.

Errrmmmm...

If I may stick on the Medical Editor Hat for a moment...

Even singling out one person when describing the sample would make me queasy. I'd be happier with "Among a sample of 1,000 Live Journals, we found..."

For 'n value of happier,' I would be happier with that.

But not bothering to get individual consent from the people in the sample just has the taste of sloppy methodology to me.

I think that is what it comes down to for me. I know that for most standard studies, there needs to be informed consent. And I don't see how this meets that standard without individually informing each and every journal owner.

[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).

[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.

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

Yep, that's what the academic in me says, too. It's just sloppy. Any decent university has a human subjects committee with rules, and granted, I've not worked at every university, but informed consent is pretty standard.

The human being in me, of course, just says "This is a sensitive subject, and these are *people's feelings* we're talking about."

-J

[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." :)

[redbird]

You're right. I was sloppily envisioning an article that had it all in vague aggregate, but some way for (at least) the peer reviewers to know who the subjects were.

I also wonder how he picked his subjects such that the mean age was as high as it was ("high" by LJ user standards, that is). Did someone tell him he could only use journals by people who said they were at least 18?

[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.

[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.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

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

[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.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

Whoops, pasted the into the wrong window, so the responses to you are switched.

Yeah, "on a postcard", but it feels like I'd tacked up the postcard in a coffeeshop that my friends gather in, and someone from the outside had swooped in and removed them and taken them away for research.

Hmm...Something to discuss with a friend of mine who does historical research on letters.

(And going back to topic, my posts on Usenet tended to be far less personal, as far as datasharing.)

[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.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

I think it has something to do with the nature of the choice. I control whether I put content onto Livejournal, but I couldn't control anything about how Amazon used the information I had to give them to receive an order. (It was less the way they were using the data and more the strong implication in their notification about it that they would do whatever they wanted in future, too.) LJ content is on the web; that is the service they provide me. They're not taking information I gave them for another purpose and using it in a way I didn't consent to.

[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.)