Hre is Prof Tim Grant discussing some of the ethics of cross-referencing/identifying people online, doxxing, etc:
'this is a really really tough problem. We've been trying to work on something recently which is operational to help do this kind of thing and it is really really hard to know what to do,
We have some idea that the use of Idi and (?) is really useful for this okay and we have some idea that refining profiles will be really useful for this but I'm
hoping that in the next 10 or 15 years we'll be able to do this I don't think it's a short project maybe 5 to 10 years if we're really good, okay, and get lots and lots of money - any funders in the room?
Yeah okay so this is the idea of author search but it raises a really important problem as to whether we should be doing this now this is pretty big Big Brother stuff yeah who should we allow to be anonymous on the internet - everyone? why not, yeah and you get this classic idea of a right to privacy which is enshrined in European rights, yeah, even when we all put our lives on the internet we still have a right to privacy and so I've got a right to put my life on the internet anonymously if I choose.
Okay and some areas of the internet are particularly Fierce about
this so on Reddit which is an a big really big internet forum and they have rules against doxing someone doxing someone is to document their identity offline okay and you get trashed if you dox people. reveal who they really are there's a real uh sort of ethical stance that doxing is wrong you can talk about a sort of utilitarian balance of harms um and good so sometimes intrusion this sort of intrusion I'm talking about might be seen as a lesser harm yeah than the harms of online child abusers and I think most people would think that okay, but it's still dangerous, and for me I struggle with the idea that a lesser harm becomes a good, and we've been working with applied ethicists at Waret[?] University and a guy called Chris [?] and he, too, talks about the ethical residue that the utilitarian position leaves: I'm doing something bad but it's not as bad as that, yeah, and that's uncomfortable. And he's developed a idea for which he applies to undercover policing and other Co operations of what he calls an ethical liability model and he takes the idea of self-defense.
Okay so if someone comes at you with a knife you've most people's intuitions is ethically you can harm that person to stop them harming you okay and that's
not about a balance of harm their action means they take on that
liability okay they are liable in an ethical sense not a legal sense but an ethical sense for the harm that they end up receiving.
Now I think this is an interesting idea okay and when you consider debates about privacy and intrusion I think it's a idea that's missing from those debates okay so if you take the authorship analysis world we recently had the Italian author Elena fente who was exposed who was writing anonymously and she seemed to need that Anonymous space to be creative to produce the novels that everyone loved and a journalist does the work and works at it and works it and goes and reveals her to the world and she says she's no longer able to work.
Okay that is something most people will believe is on balance a bad thing you
get your internet trolls where there's a huge Spectrum you get people taking the Mickey out of Ed Bull's performance on Strictly Come dance yeah to me that seems fair game and I don't really mind if people are doing that anonymously okay but then you get celebrities who are pregant who are sent pictures of dead
babies yeah so trolling isn't one thing it's a real Spectrum yeah at some point do your actions what you say or where you say it does that lead to your liability to
intrusive acts?
Now I can't provide the answers to those questions but I think those are the social discussions we need to have about the online World anonymity versus privacy to think in terms of liability. What makes you liable, this clearly makes you liable for any action we can do to find you this clearly doesn't I'd like the ethicist to work on what are the criteria in the middle here that uh allow us to do so without having the dirty hands the ethical residue, okay, which leads back to what I said at the beginning that forensic Linguistics is an attempt to improve the delivery of Justice if we just deanonimize Elena fente we're not doing that yeah but if we de-anonymize the anonymous guy abusing Children online I think we can be very content we are.'
[transcript c&p'd from youtube, my bold for emphasis, I've edited a bit of the grammar but cba doing it all, suggest checking against the vid if you want to be sure of accuracy]
So this is their self justification.
They think it's okay to misuse/abuse the data of women of Mumsnet because they've done an ethical assessment from a biased, prejudiced position that has already decided we are 'transphobic', then they've used that justification to go ahead and scrape data without seeking consent. Then they'll use that data to bolster their pre existing conclusion - that MN is 'transphobic' and further, they'll claim that the site is full of 'hate crime'.
Fuck that noise.