[rubylark]

Demanding a subject to actively participate in your study upon pain of vague and mostly incorrect legal threat is ethically wrong. Passive participation (like scraping) without consent is morally wrong, but since it doesn't cause undue distress to the subjects, it is not as big of a story.

The IRB in this case didn't consider this ethically suspect because "websites aren't people". And yet the study disproportionately targeted small websites where there is, in many cases, only one person involved.