Andrew Gordon studies the way that people narrate events in their lives. The computer scientist, who is based at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, has a seemingly inexhaustible source of raw data for his experiments: blogs. And, although the authors of these blogs often obscure their identities, Gordon says that it is relatively easy to figure out who they are, by using information from photographs that they post or by looking up the registrant of the blog’s domain name.
Can Gordon use information from the blog posts freely? As the Internet has become an ever-more essential research tool, scientists and institutional review boards (IRBs) facing such questions have been frustrated by the muddiness of existing regulations.
Now, an advisory committee to the US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), which governs human-subjects research, has endorsed a 20-point set of recommendations that could help. But some scientists worry that the recommendations might place more areas of Internet research under the purview of IRBs, which have been attacked by their critics as capricious, overly cautious groups that add time, complexity and costs to studies (see A. Halavais Nature 480, 174–175; 2011).