RDAP Summit 2025

When Data Is People: Ethics, Privacy, and Ownership for Research and AI Uses of Public Data

In U.S. academic settings, research uses of publicly available data such as social media content typically does not fall under the regulated umbrella of human subjects research, and therefore is often overlooked in discussions of research ethics. Similarly, recent attention to Common Crawl and other widespread web scraping for the purposes of training AI systems such as ChatGPT has sparked conversation about both the legal and ethical implications of using public data without consent. This talk unpacks some of the normative, legal, and ethical considerations for both of these contexts, with an emphasis on unintended consequences, vulnerable populations, and what questions academics and developers should asking of themselves and the data they collect.

Speaker

Casey Fiesler is an Associate Professor of Information Science (and Computer Science by courtesy) at University of Colorado Boulder. She researches and teaches in the areas of technology ethics, internet law and policy, and online communities. Her work on research ethics for data science, ethics education in computing, and broadening participation in computing has been supported by the National Science Foundation, and she is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award. Also a public scholar, she is a frequent commentator and speaker on topics of technology ethics and policy, and her research has been covered everywhere from The New York Times to Teen Vogue (though she’s particularly proud of her TikToks). She holds a PhD in Human-Centered Computing and a a JD from Vanderbilt Law School.