12 August 2014 by Vindu Goel – “The New York Times”

As Data Overflows Online, Researchers Grapple With Ethics. Scholars are grappling with the ethical implications of using big data collected by corporations in order to conduct social science research. On the one hand, the potential for research could be transformative for the field because of the potential increase in accessibility to the field as well as a drastic increase in sample size. On the other hand, controversy arises from users who are hesitant to have their data included as part of large experiments. This issue came to a head recently with revelations of Facebook conducting an experiment on the affect of social networking and mood that was widely publicized and criticized.