| > i think maybe that this is not a technical problem, but more an ethical one. under the open data approach, if you want to study humans you probably would need to get express informed consent that indicates that their data will be public and that it could be linked back to them. As someone who wants science to advance, I want highly trusted researchers to be able to do studies that involve my private, personal data, that I would not consent to being public and linked back to me. It is highly important to me that we allow these studies to not use open data. A great example of this is the US college scorecard, which uses very private tax returns to measure how much college degrees and majors contribute to income (not the only value of college education, but certainly an important one): https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/ Only high degrees of trust allowed this data to be published on extremely private information, and I think that makes for a better world. I am pro-open data, but research on non-open data should absolutely exist. For instance, should any research about mental health for transgender people be abolished? Because anything on that subject is not going to be open, or at the least those who would be open to their data being public are a probably non-representative subset. |