Re-Mediating Research Ethics

Abstract

This article is a theoretical and empirical exploration of the meaning that accompanies contractual agreements, such as the End-User License Agreements (EULAs) that participants of online communities are required to sign as a condition of participation. As our study indicates, clicking “I agree” on the often lengthy conditions presented during the installation and updating process typically permits third parties (including researchers) to monitor the digitally-mediated actions of users. Through our small-scale study in which we asked participants which terms of EULAs they would find agreeable, the majority confirmed that they simply clicked through the terms presented to them without much knowledge about the terms to which they were agreeing. From a research ethics standpoint, we reflect upon whether or not informed consent is achieved in these cases and pose a challenge to the academic research community to attend to the socio-technical shift from informed consent to a more nebulous concept of contractual agreement, online and offline.

The relationship between ownership and possession: observations from the context of digital virtual goods

“…Fragmented ownership structures present significant and yet to be fully realised consequences for the end consumers of DVGs and 795 this is particularly problematic given the multitude of evidence to suggest that EULAs and Terms of Service agreements are rarely read. In Chee, Taylor, and De Castell (2012) study of online gamers, only 3% reported that they read the entire contractual agreement and 62% read none of its content, a finding echoed in a range of contexts including social media (Debatin, Lovejoy Horn & Hughes, 2009;Gross & Acquisti, 800 2005), smartphone applications (Cotton & Bolan, 2012) and a broad array of thirdparty software (Bakos, Marotta-Wurgler, & Trossen, 2009). Even where contractual agreements are read their content may leave the consumer confused as to exactly what rights they hold, resulting in assumptions based on existing understandings of the relationship between possession and ownership (often drawing from experiences of material con-805 sumption).…”

Crowdsourcing as a Tool for Research: Methodological, Fair, and Political Considerations

“…Others point to unequal power dynamics between requesters and workers (Samuel, 2018), low compensation rates for completing HITs (Silberman et al, 2018), and the economically precarious circumstances that many crowd workers are in as reasons to question using crowdsourcing in the first place (Berg et al, 2018). And as in other areas of online-mediated research (e.g., Chee et al, 2012), questions of research ethics and the extent to which consent can be validated are not entirely resolved. Through a critical examination of crowdsourcing, this article offers a step toward improving conditions for requesters and workers, and addressing crowdsourcing's shortcomings as a research tool both methodologically and in terms of research ethics.…”

Alienated Playbour

“…Increasing efforts on the part of games companies to automatically document the in-game activities of players has enabled quantitative researchers to amass and analyze large quantities of in-game data, often without players' explicit consent (Chee, Taylor, & de Castell, 2012). As we have shown, however, our study participants' involvement in EVE does not stop once they log off: a great portion of their involvement is conducted in spaces, and through practices, that are outside of New Eden and therefore, from the point of view of server-side logs, invisible.…”