A quick intro to the issue: I've been doing some work on trying to development guidelines for ethical research online. I'm part of working groups from APA and AoIR to develop formal policies. There are lots of thorny issues. Here's an example of a controversial situation: studying discourse in chatrooms.
View 1: "A chat room is like a public square" Linguists reserve the right to record dialog in public places and study its formal properties. They can take notes or even tape record conversations say in a park. They don't need consent for this. Identity of subjects is disguised. Many linguists argue that open Internet chatrooms are an analogous situation, and they can record whatever they like and analyze it without acknowledging their presence.
View 2: "A chat room is like my living room" Others argue that because chat rooms are normally not recorded, participants have a reasonable expectation that discourse there is ephemeral. You can't record it without permission. You can't make individuals be subjects in an experimental study without their freely-given informed consent.
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-- Amy
Amy Bruckman
Assistant Professor
College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
Email: asb@cc.gatech.edu