Sooooob

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In regards to your recent email

Thank you for the offer, however I tend not to accept payment wherever possible for my editing as I never started editing Wikipedia for money, and I am not able to comfortably complete the interview. Thank you for the offer though and I’m happy to answer a few questions for you via email if you would like :) Zippybonzo | talk | contribs (they/them) 17:59, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Dear Zippybonzo, thank you for your response! While our research team offers compensation through donations, we fully respect your decision not to relate Wikipedia activity with monetary value. I truly appreciate your interest in our study and your willingness to assist! I will contact you should we need insights beyond the interview :) Sooooob (talk) 02:08, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

Violation of the spirit of UCOC in your survey

hi Sooooob, dwmc, aconversationalone: You wrote by email, If you are interested in participating, please complete our Participation Questionnaire!:\n https: // forms. gle / XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (hash hidden by me).

It defeats the point of doing research on Wikipedia – which is fundamentally based on respect for the community, free software, and open access to knowledge while avoiding as much as possible any violation of people's privacy and computer security – to carry out "research" that requests participants to violate their privacy and computer security for the purposes of selling that data to advertisers. While you personally are unlikely to sell that data, Google is well-known to have the sale of that data as its main practical goal, in line with its legal obligation to maximise the financial gains of its shareholders (i.e. it is more or less legally required to act unethically; but that is its problem, not ours). Requesting Wikipedians to sell their private data is contrary to the spirit of UCOC.

I strongly recommend that you start learning at https://switching.software where there is information on resources (software, servers) that are much less likely to abuse the community that you aim to research. You will find software that can be verified – like Mediawiki that we are using to communicate by here – rather than unverifiable software; and the servers are generally run transparently on behalf of the community, not secretly for maximising the selling of propaganda (a.k.a. advertisements).

To quote from Criticism of Google, ethical concerns about Alphabet/Google include concern for tax avoidance, misuse and manipulation of search results, its use of others' intellectual property, concerns that its compilation of data may violate people's privacy and collaboration with the US military on Google Earth to spy on users, censorship of search results and content, and the energy consumption of its servers as well as concerns over traditional business issues such as monopoly, restraint of trade, antitrust, patent infringement, indexing and presenting false information and propaganda in search results, and being an "Ideological Echo Chamber". I don't understand how you can consider requiring participants to give their private data (IP address, user agent, browser window size, language preferences, HTTP cookies) to Google to be ethically compatible with Wikipedia research. Boud (talk) 14:36, 3 March 2024 (UTC)

Dear Boud,

Thank you for raising your concerns regarding our Participation Questionnaire. We note that the University of Washington IRB reviewed and approved our research. The software that we use was part of the approval process and the current software meets both Federal and local UW requirements for security and confidentiality compliance. While we understand your reservations about using tools associated with large tech companies like Google, we also carefully considered safety concerns throughout the selection of tools and the overall methodological process. We do not believe that our research procedures violate any of the WMF or Wikipedia community norms. Nevertheless, we have heard your concern.

Thank you,

Sooooob Sooooob (talk) 00:51, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

It's rather unclear what you are saying. If you understand [my] reservations, that means that you are aware that your use of Google violates the survey participants' privacy and computer security for the purposes of selling that data to advertisers, but in that case the rest of your statement wouldn't make sense, since you don't apologise at all. You state that a university board and some US-federal and university criteria fail to protect participants' privacy (they allow the use of Google services), which is interesting information; and that the WMF and some parts of the Wikipedia community consider privacy violation and computer security violation to be an acceptable norm, which are credible guesses; but the fact that several people and groups accept unethical behaviour doesn't justify doing the same. The ethical violation is not a vague issue of Google being "a large tech company". The evidence of the violations is overwhelming. Since you say that you carefully considered safety concerns throughout the selection of tools and the overall [method] (I don't see the difference between a "method" and a "methodological process"), I guess we agree to disagree on the evidence. I admit that it's difficult to interpret "we have heard your concern" to mean a proper checking of the evidence. In any case, the evidence is unlikely to disappear. You're welcome to propose Criticism of Google for WP:AFD, though I think you don't stand a snowball's chance in hell of getting it deleted. The good thing about Wikipedia is that this discussion is public and permanently archived; your use of privacy violation as part of your research method is (indirectly, via this discussion) on the public record.

For future projects, I really do recommend that you look through https://switching.software in order to stop violating your survey participants' privacy and instead start contributing to building a healthy community. Ethical tools are available. Boud (talk) 01:05, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for your input. Sooooob (talk) 00:24, 9 March 2024 (UTC)