For people new to this and wondering what this is all about: it's about the right to privacy and anonymity for every user on this site.
A timeline:
- Two men from Aston University scraped the contents of Mumsnet for use in their forensic linguistics research and stashed it in a lab somewhere at Aston for other researchers to use.
- Various researchers used that dataset without any Mumsnetters noticing because their article titles didn't have the word "Mumsnet" in, until...
- ...a PhD student decided to mine the dataset for evidence of written transphobia with the intention of correlating it to real-world hate crimes, because of course correlation always proves causality...
- ...and put the word "Mumsnet" into her presentation title, attracting the attention of a poster from FWR who was none too pleased to have her Grainger-test-passing legally protected beliefs libelled as "transphobia".
- Some digging then revealed the earlier research outputs and the existence of the stored dataset, at which point the Site Stuff thread was created to inform MNHQ.
The data collection is against Mumsnet's Terms of Service and is likely to bring Aston into GDPR infringement because postings taken in aggregate could identify individuals and users had posted "special category" data such as health information.
The problem is therefore far bigger than FWR regulars being called names by a PhD student. Every poster on this site, including women weighing up whether to have an abortion and talking about their children's disabilities, has had all their posts hoovered up and stored in a form that makes it much much easier to search by anyone who Aston wants to give access to, so much much easier to comb through a user's posting history to look for identifying details that could out them in real life.