Comments on: Facebook Datasets and Private Chrome

By: Liminal states » Berkman Center doesn’t bother to consult with privacy experts before publishing 1700 students’ Facebook data (DRAFT)

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 06:57:14 +0000

[...] Facebook Datasets and Private Chrome, Fred Stutzman, Unit [...]

By: Michael Zimmer

Michael Zimmer — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 18:16:00 +0000

Eszter is right on both counts. I’ve already figured out the school based on the majors listed (click the link on my name to the left). It would have taken the researchers little effort to make the majors generic.

Do you know if the IRB records are publicly available? I’m very interested in how the research was presented and how the IRB ruled on issues like this.

By: Eszter

Eszter — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 13:36:51 +0000

I think it’s hard to imagine that some of this anonymity wouldn’t be breached with some of the participants in the sample. For one thing, some nationalities are only represented by one person. Another issue is that the particular list of majors makes it quite easy to guess which specific school was used to draw the sample. Put those two pieces of information together and I can imagine all sorts of identities becoming rather obvious to at least some people.

By: Michael Zimmer

Michael Zimmer — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 04:19:56 +0000

The non-identifiability of this dataset is indeed up for debate:

By: michaelzimmer.org » Archives » On the “Anonymity” of the Facebook Dataset

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 04:18:43 +0000

[...] research purposes, which I know a lot of people who will find this quite valuable (and thanks to Fred Stutzman for bringing it to my [...]

By: Andrew

Andrew — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 23:54:13 +0000

Hi Fred -

Do you have a view on the merits of the Dataverse Network Project?

Regards
Andrew