Living Labs - An Ethical Challenge for Researchers and Platform Providers

摘要

The infamous Facebook emotion contagion experiment is one of the mostprominent and best-known online experiments based on the concept of what wehere call "living labs". In these kinds of experiments, real-world applicationssuch as social web platforms trigger experimental switches inside their systemto present experimental changes to their users - most of the time without theusers being aware of their role as virtual guinea pigs. In the Facebook examplethe researches changed the way users' personal timeline was compiled to testthe influence on the users' moods and feelings. The reactions to theseexperiments showed the inherent ethical issues such living labs settings bringup, mainly the study's lack of informed consent procedures, as well as a moregeneral critique of the flaws in the experimental design. In this chapter, we describe additional use cases: The so-called living labsthat focus on experimentation with information systems such as search enginesand wikis and especially on their real-world usage. The living labs paradigmallows researchers to conduct research in real-world environments or systems.In the field of information science and especially information retrieval -which is the scientific discipline that is concerned with the research ofsearch engines, information systems, and search related algorithms andtechniques - it is still common practice to perform in vitro or offlineevaluations using static test collections. Living labs are widely unknown orunavailable to academic researchers in these fields. A main benefit of livinglabs is their potential to offer new ways and possibilities to experiment withinformation systems and especially their users, but on the other hand theyintroduce a whole set of ethical issues that we would like to address in thischapter.