Corpus 2

[TokyoBouncyBall]

A summary would be good and I might do one later but Aston, data scraping, astonishing lack of contrition…

Completely ignored the last two queries about naming MN but not the others.

That one really needs a "Can you actually answer the questions" response

Also didn't address the issue of obtaining consent from the forum operators.

Aston University published a nonbinary student’s phone number online knowing that said student was under scrutiny due to they/thems unfounded Hate Crime accusations directed at users of the UK’s biggest parenting website?

Lucky we aren’t actually committing Hate Crimes and we don’t actually hate Eden Palmer or this would be far worse than just a GDPR breach.

I know right!

Luckily it was Mumsnet and rather than share the number far and wide posters instead went out of their way to alert the university to their fuck up!

We are not the monsters people think we are!

FOI only requires that the institution provide its records. If it doesn't have them, it can't provide them.

I suspect that between the story breaking on MN and that FOI being submitted, there was some hasty deletion going on. It's illegal to delete records once a FOI has been submitted, but not if you can see from social media etc that one is likely to be submitted soon.

did not involve interaction with human participants

Do Aston not see women as human then? Or is it because it's online and not face to face interaction? That's one hell of a get out clause.

God that's disingenuous.

The fact is that some usernames could be linked to real world identities, we have no trust in their hollow assertion they didn't try to do this. Whilst also setting out in other research proposals that they plan to do exactly this.

Lying liars who lie.

Also, people like DNK, Jo Phoenix and Sarah P do post here under their real world names on FWR, I think also Glinner and Maya - did they delete all of posts from users who used their real names? Or address this? Hmm? These people have suffered real world abuse and in some cases very serious threats and financial losses from speaking up - how did Aston ensure that these real world names' posts were removed? Or make any effort to determine which usernames were real names? There may well be others on here who post under their true name.

It's such total bollocks that is up there with 'I didn't mean to' when your child has broken something. The equivalent of 'what did you think the result of kicking a football in the house would be, dear?' seems the appropriate answer to this.

I am wondering if we need to alert the users who post under their real names about this.

Actually, it should be Mumsnet who alert them. So I'll report this post.

I suppose they/them meant that they/them would be secretly studying us, not interacting with us?

If we were to write a (nice, polite) letter directly to Eden Palmer c/o Aston University Forensic Linguistics Department (and CC’d to supervisors and members of the ethics committee) would that totally scupper they/them’s assertion that no interaction with participants would occur?

Thus sending they/them back to the drawing board for new ethics consideration?

I mean, if we were less scrupulous people we could’ve easily scuppered the ‘no interaction with participants’ thing just by calling Eden Palmer’s personal phone number, the number that Aston University thoughtlessly published via FOI reply!

Well the lovely women who pointed out the release of Eden's phone number in the FOI have had direct interaction with Aston and you could argue with Eden already.

And as there's only 6 of us, that probably scuppers the research if nothing else did.

Oh, I got a response to my email yesterday.

I'll redact the name.

So you know, that's Aston interacting directly with me. As a human being.

To be honest with the name Arabella Scott they have no way of knowing if you are actually a real person called Arabella Scott, or if you are the ghost of the Arabella Scott

Photo ID.

Why isn’t this on the main site? I find this all incredibly disturbing, why has the media not picked up on it? A bit of me thinks that this was funded & started to close down the main outlet for women to gather & talk freely. Seems like mumsnet are in a catch 22 situation, if they publicly mention this or make an announcement on site women would start backing off, they’ll see their information as not being secure or used against them for nefarious reasons. I think this is the main goal, to cause as much disruption to mumsnet. Who are Astons big American funders? It’s concerning that this appears to be being quietly swept under the carpet by Aston & mumsnet. At least Eden has now had a taste of what it feels like to be under a microscope, obviously on a personal crusade, reap what you sow. Those FOI requests are shocking, all the n/a’s & then their monologues about supporting themselves, disgusting.

Is there anything we should be doing, organisations that hold these people to account, shouldn’t we all collectively be looking to sue Eden & Aston? Aligning women talking about their rights & trauma with incels & terrorists, libelling us all, I get that users want to remain anon but this is huge & is yet another major attack on women.

Funding is from the US government
https://www.aston.ac.uk/latest-news/aston-university-forensic-linguistics-experts-partner-113-million-funding-authorship

https://www.iarpa.gov/research-programs/hiatus

Think deeply about the distinctions that seem to have been made, in the FOI language, anyway, connecting to the idea of Human Participants (much less likely to have "willing" added to any part of the phrase at any time), or Real World Identities (as distinct from usernames and words that make up the posts that are allegedly open to all) - in 'philosophy' terms, feels more abstract, doesn't it?

This won't be accidental. Linguistics and philosophy are intertwined. But so is language and being a human in real life. Especially if written language. Quite famously, really, a real core of linguistics at all.

Then throw the layer of the scraped corpus being the source (so not the actual active forum subject to the forum managers' rules and principles), and the copyright considerations of human entities vs 'real world identities' into it all - which have also been considered intelligently within these 2-3 corpus threads.

Presumably joint MI6 / CIA project in the background. Cheltenham just down the road.

Interesting, thanks for that.

Anyone is free to complain directly to the ICO if they feel unable to complain to Aston's Data Protection Officer.

https://ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/

I've not yet done so but going by the decidedly lukewarm responses from Aston I think that's the only way we will get the thing taken seriously.

And I agree that this is a big problem for Mumsnet - not just for Aston, either. Who else is doing 'scraping'? Are women going to be happy that an institute that is conducting research to try and link posters across different platforms is scraping Mumsnet? Is everyone on Mumsnet going to be happy to be 'de anonymised' when they are sharing intimate, personal details? And when people are actively trying to create a case that Mumsnetters are committing 'hate crimes' every time they refuse to accept that men can't become women?

Are users able to request Mumsnet delete all previous posts? I've seen some users have this done before.

It does seem that Mumsnet should be making a site wide announcement to alert users that their posts/data from 2008 to 2024 may well have been scraped and possibly used for research without their knowledge or consent.

In response to ArabellaScott: Yes, I think this can be requested. But at least one person on the previous thread said they had done this and so far, nothing had happened to their posts - there were a couple of similar things they said about that, that were about 1-2 weeks apart.

Whatever Aston's action, if people lose trust in MN and MN ends up with a critical mass of withdrawal (I can imagine the scale of the practical work to try to keep up with it that this would produce as well) then Yampy is completely right.

I better duck out then as I’m obviously not ‘intelligent’ enough for this conversation & anger is clouding my judgement, wouldn’t want to lower the tone.

Yampy, I was agreeing with you, and have just said I think you're completely right. Apologies if it didn't read like that.