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by floatingatoll
1873 days ago
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That is not as cut and dried a decision as you frame it to be. California emissions testing for vehicles includes licensed smog test stations and a process where undercover inspectors bring cars that are in violation to those stations. If the smog test station is incompetent, they will be cited and perhaps stripped of their operating license. If another state decided that they’d like to start performing random tests upon their network of smog test stations, without any retaliation to those stations, then it would not be a violation of ethics for that state to send undercover cars through the stations. It would be unethical to punish those who fail undercover tests, unless the state had announced that random undercover testing was beginning and that punishments would be applied for failures. The researchers were not attempting to modify the behavior of the participants, nor did they seem to be interested in naming and shaming specific maintainers, so it’s not as simple as “anyone who comes into contact with the experiment must be fully informed”. |
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Do you see how that differs from an academic randomly experimenting on an open source project with no notice or warning?
Retail store owners/managers contract out “mystery shoppers” to test compliance with retail store policy and procedure. This example is also nothing like the UMN experimenting on Linux, since there’s a contract and both parties are aware.
A similar example to the UMN/Linux situation would be an academic doctor deciding to randomly test blood donor screening by sending in HIV positive people to lie about their status in order to donate tainted blood and only telling the Red Cross or whoever after the blood has been donated.