Hosted by the Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship and the Tech Policy Lab at the University of Washington

Companies produce and sell, and academics study and research. This tidy line, which has probably never accurately described reality, has been revealed to be illusory by the recent crush of news about the ways in which profit-seeking companies today research and study their customers constantly. Whether to improve their products and services or to advance the pursuit of knowledge (or both, or something in between), we have been introduced to many important research studies emanating not from Academia but instead from Silicon Valley: Netflix and Amazon know that if you like this, you’ll also like that; OK Cupid investigates the dynamics of human dating and attraction; Target knows if you’re pregnant and when you’re due; and Facebook studies the way human emotion spreads.

This last study, the Facebook “emotion contagion study,” led to a firestorm of online commentary when it was revealed in June 2014. The outpouring of blog posts, newspaper articles, and tweets raised dozens of fascinating questions that demand answers, so as an experiment of our own, on Thursday, December 4, 2014, the Silicon Flatirons Center will assemble some of the many astute and interesting commenters from that episode, together with other thought leaders from the academy, industry, civil society, and the legal community, to talk about the changing face of science, research, and ethics.

The first panel will debate whether we should be alarmed by the type of human social science currently taking place on online services. Call it A/B testing, product development, marketing studies, or human subject studies, companies now routinely manipulate what we see, hear, think, and feel. But companies have been doing this for years, for example in advertising, so is this a new fear? Is this treating people as lab rats, giving consumers what they want, or something else? Is it justified by the way this research improves services, often precisely in the way consumers want?

The second panel will focus on the changing nature of science and research, particularly focused on the public versus private divide. How does the data a company can access about human behavior differ from what non-affiliated researchers can access, and is this a new phenomenon? What is happening to the academic traditions of peer review and public release of research? Do the best social science Ph.D graduates feel more of a pull from corporate work over academic work, and does that matter? Isn’t the world better off knowing what types of research are being conducted within corporations?

The third and fourth panels will discuss how to ensure the ethics of human subjects research going forward, with the third focusing on the substance and the fourth on the procedures and institutions of research. The third panel will consider whether “informed consent” is a viable concept in the Big Data age. Can Terms of Service ever qualify as informed consent? What about the so-called “Fair Information Practice Principles”? Do they protect against the kind of harms the second panel debated?

The fourth panel will look at the institutions for ethical review, with a particular focus on the history and current status of institutional review boards, or IRBs. Should corporations set up consumer review boards or institutional review boards, as some have proposed? Are there incentives to push companies to shore up their standards of ethical review? What role does law play? What role does law enforcement play?