Research ethics rules cannot restrain a company that routinely manipulates users at scale.
Evidence
Despite his conviction on this point, Grimmelmann acknowledged in the final pages of his analysis that even the most rigorous imposition of the Common Rule would do little to curb the immense power of a company such as Facebook that routinely manipulates user behavior at scale, using means that are indecipherable and therefore uncontestable. Like Fiske, Grimmelmann sensed the larger project of economies of action just beyond the reach of established law and social norms. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 953
Categorization
- XREF: They don’t govern the everyday behavior-modification enterprise of surveillance capitalism — the core thesis of the book is that the research exception reveals, not violates, the underlying operation. Echoes the ‘economies of action’ framing established earlier in the book. — connects to: Embedding ethics in software cannot guarantee lawful conduct because software is reprogrammable.