Sensible measures to ethically use freely available, but personal web-based comments in research? In a range of fields (I have in mind gender and sexuality) users make Internet comments revealing personal details about themselves.  Some sites even automatically link to their personal Facebook page.  While this data may be useful for research, there are ethical issues as to how to use this data.

On one hand, they have voluntarily published this material online, and made it accessible to the world.

On the other hand, presumably the audience they had in mind for their post is likely to be limited a handful of users.  It is personal information that could potentially be used against the user.


  Question: What are sensible measures to ethically use freely available, but personal web-based comments in research?
Talk to your Institutional Review Board (IRB). You will not be allowed to use any of the information you are collecting unless your research plan has been approved by your IRB, and they will likely require you to deidentify or anonymize data. What exactly is sensible or not, we cannot advise you here -- it's not a question of common sense but of what you can get approved by your IRB, and approval by the IRB is the single important factor in what you can and cannot do.