Obtaining informed consent online may involve the researcher posting to communities or individually contacting users and providing them with
participant information sheets and consent forms to sign. However, there are practical difficulties involved in procuring informed consent from all members of online communities, as not everyone may see posts, and some members may have left, leaving their contributions still visible.
Langford (1996) suggests that it would be advantageous for researchers wishing to conduct analysis of posts and archives to consult the introductory notes or terms of electronic forums. Terms may openly request that research should not be carried out on the forum. Where clear directives do not exist, it
may be possible to contact the list moderator and gain permission to conduct research. However, researchers need to bear in mind that any permission gained may not necessarily be viewed as consent by all members of the group (Reid, 1996). Whether consent needs to be obtained from individual
contributors or from communities and online system administrators is fraught with uncertainty. The issue of ownership/intellectual property of the data may be addressed in the terms and conditions, but the moderators cannot speak for people they do not know personally. Even if they did, it would not be sufficient to form a legally binding contract in the real world, so they cannot really be considered gatekeepers online.
However, as my research revealed, seeking such permission can also create further ethical problems. In other studies, researchers have sought informed consent and found similar unforeseen impact on group processes. King (1996) cites one member of an email support group who, in response to continual posts to the list from people wishing to conduct research, refused to “open up”
online to be “dissected” (1996:122). Hewson et al. (2003) also question
whether contacting potential participants may be viewed as “spamming”, itself an invasion of privacy (Hewson et al., 2003:40).
While informed consent is desirable, it is not always essential. In
“non-participant observation” it has been accepted that behaviour conducted within the public domain may be observed and researched without consent (British Psychological Society, 1993). The justification for this exception is to ensure that natural behaviour is observed in its context, without contamination by the researcher’s aims and objectives. Similar arguments have been made for covert observational research. The famous study conducted by Laud Humphreys (1970), which investigated the social background of men engaging in homosexual behaviour in public toilet facilities, is an example of the way perceptions of what constitutes public (and therefore qualifies as research that can be conducted without obtaining prior informed consent) can be
challenged.
In accordance with this perspective is published material in the public domain, where researchers may be exempt from obtaining consent for data collected from television, public records, radio, printed books, conferences or public spaces such as parks. Data from online newsgroups and forums are readily
accessible to anyone, and, if archived, are accessible to the public months or years after messages were posted (Frankel and Siang, 1999). Some researchers interpret cyberspace to be part of the public domain, since the types of web activity they observe are as accessible to anyone as a television or newspaper interview. These researchers believe that the responsibility falls on the
disseminators of the messages to filter out what they might consider revealing or private information (Liu, 1999). They adopt the position that this type of research should be exempt from the informed consent requirement, as it is conducted in public and so the requirement is unnecessary.
Due to the lack of public awareness, some commentators/researchers have argued that messages within online communities should not be collected without the author providing prior permission (Marx, 1998; King, 1996). For instance, Egdorf and Rahoi (1994) sought the permission of their computer-mediated communication (CMC) groups prior to conducting research on publicly available lists and archives. The use of such material without the permission of its authors was viewed as potentially damaging to the research process, especially if group members were to discover their words had been used without their knowledge or consent. In these circumstances, participants on discussion forums may feel that their privacy has been invaded and may become distrustful of online groups and of the research community. Wilson and Atkinson (2005) also question whether online ethnography might be a form of ‘electronic eavesdropping’. An individual might post information on his or her public profiles to be shared with friends and peers; however, this does not mean that they have consented for this information to be collated,
analysed and published, in effect turning them into research subjects
(Eysenbach and Till, 2001). Hudson and Bruckman (2004) found that while it might be widely considered ethically acceptable to capture and analyse
interactions and conversations in a public square without consent, this model did not match the expectations of their participants in real-time chatrooms, who felt strongly that “one may not ethically record an otherwise ephemeral medium without consent from participants” (2004:118).
However, many online studies have been conducted without permission. Fox et al. (2005) engaged in web research that involved scrutinising the content of open-access discussion forums without the express permission of the website moderator or the contributing parties. Furthermore, Eysenback and Till (2001)
have contended that it is ethical to record activities in a public place without consent provided individuals are not identifiable. Human subject research norms such as informed consent do not apply to material that is published.
However, the nature of online content means that it is more complex to distinguish between published and non-published material (Bruckman, 2004:103). Rees and White (2012) also conducted documentary analysis, viewing their online data the same as any other publicly available text, in their study of forums discussing rape prevention. Meanwhile, Hewson et al. (2003) argue that:
“If confidentiality is ensured, and given that authors publish such
documents with the knowledge that they are publicly available, we do not consider this approach to raise any serious ethical problems, though this statement is bound to raise controversy” (Hewson et al., 2003:40).
Furthermore, Garton (1997) claims that researchers are “only participating in the electronic equivalent of hanging-out on street corners...where they would never think of wearing large signs identifying themselves as ‘Researcher’”.
Posts to email forums have also been recorded and stored without consent in a number of studies (Finn and Lavitt, 1994; Reid, 1996).
What is public and what is private is blurred on the Web. It is not sufficient simply to rely on whether a site is public or not; privacy and confidentiality are further important considerations for online research. These issues will now be discussed in more detail.