Privacy versus Research in Big Data

Humans are hard to study. First, humans are uncooperative research material because they are each so different from one another. Unlike minerals, where an experiment on one pile of sodium produces the same results as it would on another pile of sodium, the same treatment can have very different effects on different people. What’s worse, when it comes to behavioral research, even the same human can make different decisions at different points in time or in different contexts. These problems can be overcome to some extent through good research design, but the methods for doing so often involve some trivial or significant deceit – secret observations and interventions.