This article analyzes recent cases of company-sponsored online experiments with unsuspecting users and discusses the ethical aspects of such experimentation. These cases illustrate a new type of online research where companies modify their algorithms to intentionally misinform or mislead users. Unlike typical forms of A/B testing, where two versions of the same website are presented to different users to evaluate interface changes, algorithm modification is a deeper form of testing where changes in program code induce user deception. Thus, we propose (...) to call this new approach C/D experimentation to distinguish it from the surface-level website evaluation associated with A/B testing. Three aspects raise ethical concerns regarding C/D experimentation: the absence of user consent to participate in research, the presence of intentional deception, and the complete lack of protection for human subjects who partake in privately funded behavioral research. Three recommendations are proposed to address these issues: to develop an ethical code of conduct for subject protection shared by online companies, to include special provisions for C/D experiments in social networking platforms, and to create an independent user advocacy board to protect the rights of users who partake in online research conducted in the private sector. (shrink)

Although downloading music through unapproved channels is illegal, statistics indicate that it is widespread. The following study examines the attitudes and perceptions of college students that are potentially engaged in music downloading. The methodology includes a content analysis of the recommendations written to answer an ethical vignette. The vignette presented the case of a subject who faces the dilemma of whether or not to download music illegally. Analyses of the final reports indicate that there is a vast and inconsistent array (...) of actions and underlying feelings toward digital music downloading. The findings reveal inconsistencies between participants’ recommendations (what the subject should do) and their attitudes and opinions on the matter (what they would do in a similar situation). These inconsistencies support the notion that as technology evolves, it creates discrepancies between the way things are and the way the law expects them to be, leaving society in a muddle, trying to reconcile the two. What remains to be seen is whether the discrepancy in the case of music downloading becomes extreme enough that the law changes to accommodate an increasingly prevalent behavior, or whether new business models will emerge to bridge the gap between legality and reality. (shrink)

This article examines whether a crowdsourced research participant who quits a study before its completion should receive any monetary compensation. The study is focused on participants recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk, the most widely used crowdsourcing platform, and examines the tensions between participants’ rights and research objectives when online labor markets are used to recruit research participants. The discussion is informed by the recent literature on online research with crowdsourced samples, evidence from human subjects’ practices at top US universities, and (...) an ethical analysis based on distributive justice and consequentialism. The results indicate that compensating crowdsourced research subjects who fail to complete their participation jeopardizes the benefits of many who dutifully participate and undermines the overall value of the research enterprise for advancing knowledge. By examining the issue of payment for crowdsourced participants who drop out, this article sheds light on modern ethical issues in online research and offers practical recommendations for researchers and ethics scholars. (shrink)