Craig Partridge, Mark Allman. Addressing Ethical Considerations in Network Measurement Papers, Communications of the ACM, 59(10), October 2016.

Abstract:

Network measurement---because it is typically at arm's length from human beings---does not comfortably fit into the usual human-centered models for evaluating ethical research practices. Nonetheless, the network measurement community is increasingly facing ethics issues and finding itself poorly prepared. We discuss why the ethical issues appear somewhat different for network measurement, and propose that measurement papers be required to include an ethical considerations section. We believe that some of the ideas here will also prove applicable to other areas of computing systems measurement, where the researcher's attempt to measure a system may have an impact on human beings.

BibTeX:

@article{PA16,
    author  =  "Craig Partridge and Mark Allman",
    title   =  "{Addressing Ethical Considerations in Network Measurement Papers}",
    journal =  "Communications of the ACM",
    volume  =  "59",
    number  =  "10",
    year    =  2016,
    month   =  oct,
}

A pre-print of the paper---which was slightly edited for publication---is available here.

This is an update of a paper that appeared at the ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Ethics in Networked Systems Research in August 2015.