Comment by fishycrackers
4 years ago
I agree. I personally don't care if it meets the official definition of human subject research. It was unethical, regardless of whether it met the definition or not. I think the ban is appropriate and wouldn't lose any sleep if the ban also enacted by other open-source projects and communities.
It's a real shame because the university probably has good, experienced people who could contribute to various OSS projects. But how can you trust any of them when the next guy might also be running an IRB exempt security study.
Okay, by that logic we should ban anything that comes out of Facebook
There are a lot of people who in fact do consider “research” that comes out of social media companies to be both ethically and, in many cases, procedurally tainted, and thus unusable and unpublishable as-is.