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mbarkerI'm probably not making friends this week. There was a survey from IEEE, and since I teach research and sometimes think I should support research, I went and filled it out. Supposedly anonymous and purely for research purposes . . .
Then I got an offer to take classes and apply for certification -- with a note about my responses to the survey.
I wrote back suggesting that this was not a good idea, since it violates privacy and confidentiality of the survey.
The director of promotions wrote back to me saying that the database of respondents was only available to his office, and that he would remove me to protect my privacy.
I thought about it, and wrote him a letter explaining that frankly my privacy was not the point. I explained that when I teach the students how to do research, we try very hard to explain about protecting privacy and confidentiality of all participants, and how this requires that the researchers not be able to identify individual participants. I suggested that using a research study to collect contact information makes it harder for real research to get responses. I find this especially problematic because it uses the IEEE name -- which is supposed to be a professional association.
I'm not sure how he will respond. But at least I feel as if I have tried to protect the research study from being turned into a covert marketing tool. Not that I'm likely to win this battle, but at least I can try reminding people that such subversion weakens all of us.
Abusing public trust may be a one-time winning move, but in the long run it destroys the social economy of trust that we all depend on. Not a good idea. Now the question is whether or not I can explain that to a marketeer.
Then I got an offer to take classes and apply for certification -- with a note about my responses to the survey.
I wrote back suggesting that this was not a good idea, since it violates privacy and confidentiality of the survey.
The director of promotions wrote back to me saying that the database of respondents was only available to his office, and that he would remove me to protect my privacy.
I thought about it, and wrote him a letter explaining that frankly my privacy was not the point. I explained that when I teach the students how to do research, we try very hard to explain about protecting privacy and confidentiality of all participants, and how this requires that the researchers not be able to identify individual participants. I suggested that using a research study to collect contact information makes it harder for real research to get responses. I find this especially problematic because it uses the IEEE name -- which is supposed to be a professional association.
I'm not sure how he will respond. But at least I feel as if I have tried to protect the research study from being turned into a covert marketing tool. Not that I'm likely to win this battle, but at least I can try reminding people that such subversion weakens all of us.
Abusing public trust may be a one-time winning move, but in the long run it destroys the social economy of trust that we all depend on. Not a good idea. Now the question is whether or not I can explain that to a marketeer.
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no subject
Date: 2008-08-30 02:54 pm (UTC)Groupy wants you to consolidate all your Google and Yahoo groups in one spot, certainly an attractive idea to those of us who are signed into several different groups. Sounds innocuous until you find out that use the service, you have to to give them your Yahoo!ID and password. How comfortably you are with that rather depends on how much you trust an unknown group of people to not use the information linked to your account data. Grouply, of course, says that it will not be used for anything except consolidating your groups, but what if this interesting database is hacked. Has to be a temptation to the hackers to have a one-stop shopping for people's IDs. They do enough damage as it is...do we want to make it any easier?
I guess what I am saying is I respect your stand on protecting privacy. Alas, we can't be too careful these days.