Should We Do It Just Because We Can? Methodological and Ethical Implications for Information Revelation in Online Social Networks

The massive growth in social networks presents the research with many opportunities to study issues of social behaviour and attitudes toward privacy and security in a non-intrusive manner. Subjects happily post discourse and personal information for a public audience that provides invaluable insights into attitudes, social behaviour, group interactions and similar. However, such public exposure of personal information does raise concerns for those researching identity issues, particular those around fraud and theft. An experiment demonstrates the high availability of personal information that is of value for fraudsters, and well as demonstrating issues of cyberbullying and similar. However, it does also raise issues of ethics into the validity of the methodological approach – just because the information is in the public domain, should the subject not have similar ethic rights such as the withdrawal and debriefing as a fully informed subject. This exploration is extended with another experiment that attempts to demonstrate the ease in which fraudsters can obtain information through the naivety of social network users. Therefore, while such data is invaluable to the security researcher and policy makers, the conclusion must be how far the researcher should go before the ethical considerations outweigh the value of the data.