Cell phone users secretly tracked in study

Article


Researchers secretly tracked the locations of 100,000 people outside the United States through their cell phone use and concluded that most people rarely stray more than a few miles from home.
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Study co-author Cesar Hidalgo, a physics researcher at Northeastern, said he and his colleagues didn't know the individual phone numbers because they were disguised into "ugly" 26-digit-and-letter codes.


We have decided that we want to do this study of you. Without your permission. Because you're going to get annoying about this whole privacy thing, we'll make some minimal attempts to vaguely obscure your identity.


Barabasi said he did not check with any ethics panel. Had he done so, he might have gotten an earful, suggested bioethicist Arthur Caplan at the University of Pennsylvania.

"There is plenty going on here that sets off ethical alarm bells about privacy and trustworthiness," Caplan said.


We have decided WE DON'T CARE that you don't like us studying you. We're going to do it anyways. You don't get to say no. You don't get to opt out. We have money , and we're taking what we want. And we're making up any bogus excuse we can, like pretending to sort of protect your privacy, which we are not even required to do.

Next week we're doing a different study. And since you didn't scream toooo loudly this time, it will have even fewer privacy protections than the last. Until eventually we're doing studies with no protections at all.

This is called breaking it in. We do this to horses all the time to train them to allow us to ride them.

(edit : June 15)
Got feedback saying there were newspaper retractions indicating there were ethic reviews and they followed their advice.
But ... they still did the study. And the people involved were not informed. And it pretty much just means they bought off the ethics committee that rubber stamped it. And next time around the ethics committee will have even looser rules to deal with.
Still breaking in the horse , buddy. Thanks for the url's... but they still did it and still didn't tell the people involved or give them an opt out.