Students make easy bait

Thanks to your own insatiable thirst to be virtually connected, your personal information and history is widely available online, legally and illegally, to whoever wants to get it. \nTwo graduate Informatics students just used public Web sites (www.thefacebook.com, anyone?) to help them set up an experiment that tests how social connections affect responses to requests for information on the Internet.\nWhile the research is of a vital economic and security nature, the IU campus has an interest in having students and others supporting studies at their research institution, and that support is undermined when students feel victimized. Students became human subjects without any warning.\nSure, the deception was necessary to make the experiment valid. If the selected students were warned beforehand that they would be tested on their responses to a given e-mail, the data would have been worthless. \nAnd yes, in many scientific studies, at least one party is blinded in the test. Medications are tested along with placebos as a control. But the human subjects in those studies have consented to participate in the experiment. \nPerhaps in the future, the School of Informatics department and others conducting similar experiments could send an e-mail to all students informing them they might be subjects in an experiment and give them an avenue to decline participation, such as replying to the e-mail. \nCertainly it would be unethical for, say, an exercise researcher to pull every third person from the sidewalk between classes and force them to participate in an experiment simply because they happened to be students at IU. \nMore clarification is needed about when and how students can be included in a study.\nFor one, new and returning students should be clearly reminded, and not in fine print, that they might be subjects in experiments of this type and that their University account is not really private. \nThe IU students involved in the Informatics experiment can't claim their e-mail privacy is sacrosanct, and they have to accept that complete strangers of ill will or good will can garner information about their personal lives. \nIU is extremely technology friendly to both the computer-savvy and the computer-challenged. The 24-hour hotline run by University Information Technology and Services provides a needed service, and it's good for the campus that we have computer scientists forging new research. \nAs students, we get annoyed when e-mail is down for a half-hour, and we expect instant, perfect access to anything digital. We pay our bills, develop friendships, conduct research and do our homework, all on the Internet, often from the IU network.\nThis study should remind us all not to put anything in cyberspace that isn't heavily secured and that you don't want others to see. However, it has also put an unintended spotlight on research procedures, and it will help highlight and fix technological vulnerabilities.