Reading response: ethics

This week I'd like to address the different ethical issues raised by some of the articles I read. Firstly, for my response to the NY times article "As Data Overflows Online, Researchers Grapple with Ethics", I am not entirely sure that, officially, there is a problem at all. For instance, consider the backlash after the publication of Facebook's study on users' feelings and the content of their newsfeeds. By and large, all the complaining users had no doubt wholly agreed to any such study when they first signed up for Facebook. The company obviously reserves the right to record and use user data on their own terms (as opposed to selling it to third parties which is understandably more controversial). I think the true problem is that users often don't quite know what they're getting into when becoming part of a social media network.

I'm a bit more ambivalent on the problems posed by anonymity or lack thereof. I think both of the opposing articles addressing the ethical concerns of real names vs. pseudonyms have valid points (on a side note, I found the pro-pseudonym article's description of the more pseudonym-friendly "culture" of Google+ fascinating. I'd never realized it before but in hindsight Facebook was always set up to be more of an honest and transparent community, something that's harder to impose on the type of folks who regularly use Google services and became the first adopters of Google+). Pseudonyms can certainly protect those who are endangered or marginalized, but at the same time anonymity leads to less inhibited interactions and often more vitriolic, less civil exchanges, whereas the usage of real names and identities can establish a sort of preexisting rapport as if face-to-face, though of course text communication is still lacking in the etiquette of real-life interaction. It's a complicated matter, and one that I don't see a clear-cut solution to.