2015-jones-ethical
findings extracted from this paper
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Requiring consent from device owners for co-opted censorship measurements reduces coverage and continuity, and may paradoxically increase danger: soliciting consent signals intent to participants and draws attention, whereas the prevalence of malware and third-party trackers provides plausible deniability for unwitting device owners. The authors note that more widespread co-opted measurements collectively provide greater individual protection by normalizing unexplained outbound traffic.
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The Encore technique uses cross-origin HTTP requests to induce a visiting user's browser to silently fetch a censorship target URL, enabling passive measurement of web filtering for sites including Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. The ethical argument for deployment rests on the observation that nearly all major websites already embed content from these platforms, so the additional traffic is indistinguishable from normal browsing behavior.
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University IRBs are not equipped to evaluate censorship measurement research because it falls outside the formal definition of 'human subjects' research (which requires direct intervention with individuals to collect individualized data). Despite this, the work poses real and potentially serious risks to people, leaving a governance gap with no clear institutional oversight body.
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The legality of a measurement method within a given country does not equate to safety for implicated subjects: authoritarian regimes may assess network logs based on ulterior motives unrelated to technical specifics, or may lack sufficient technical understanding to distinguish measurement traffic from deliberate access. Subjects may additionally face privacy hazards such as being falsely implicated in accessing illegal content.
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Three approaches to gathering censorship measurements exist: deploying researchers with software (snapshot coverage, researcher safety risk), deploying software to at-risk citizens (continuous but endangers locals), and co-opting existing deployed software (continuous, widespread coverage, but raises consent issues since device owners may be unwittingly implicated). The third approach offers substantially greater measurement capabilities but introduces the most unresolved ethical risk.