For my case study on ethical considerations in research, I have chosen the Tastes, Ties and Time (T3) study of 2006, wherein a group of researchers used the Facebook account data of a cohort of students from an anonymous, north-eastern American university over the students’ 4 years in college, supplemented by residential information of the students on campus, to study the relationships between online and offline social networks and provide a dataset for future research in the field of social network dynamics.

The researchers took several steps to protect the privacy of the subjects, such as the deletion of names and identification numbers from the dataset, the release of their cultural taste labels after a substantial delay, and requiring other researchers to comply with a ‘terms and conditions of use’ agreement prior to being granted access to the dataset. The project was reviewed and cleared by Harvard’s Committee on the Use of Human Subjects.

Within days of the study being published, the anonymous university was identified as Harvard College, placing the privacy of the students at risk, and subsequently the dataset was withdrawn and made unavailable.

I believe that while the T3 research team set out with the right intentions and acted in good faith, they failed to conduct ethically based research on the grounds of ethical violations regarding the nature of consent and subject privacy.

First, the researchers failed to seek consent from the students with regards to the collection of their Facebook profile data. The researchers claimed that the data they collected was publicly available on the students’ profiles, however privacy controls exist on Facebook which enable users to determine whom they wish to make their profile information visible to, and many students had set up their accounts such that only their friends or other members at Harvard could view their profiles. By using research assistants from within the Harvard community, the team gained access to information from such profiles which was inaccessible to the rest of the world, without the consent of the subjects.

The research team also failed to take consent from the students regarding the purpose for which their Facebook information was being collected and would be subsequently released to other researchers, which in my opinion amounts to the unauthorized secondary use of such information. The same lack of consent applies to housing data collected by the T3 team from the