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The legal and ethical issues of completing online surveys

I’m not sure about you, but in these times, it seems that a day doesn’t pass by without either a pop-up occurring on a website that I happen to be browsing, asking me if I would complete a survey or an unsolicited post appearing on my Facebook newsfeed making the same request – usually, however, these are cunningly disguised as ‘clickbait’ to a potentially interesting article. Now, probably, if you are like me, you ignore these requests, but there are people out there who do complete them, otherwise why would companies spend so much money writing them and persistently sending them out as part of their endeavours to discover our habits and ‘likes’ so that they can hone their advertising campaign?

But what are the legal and ethical issues of completing these online surveys?

To companies, online surveys present a number of potential benefits:

To us, the humble participant however, the online survey is something that we should have a healthy wariness of.

One large area of concern when completing online surveys is personal Internet security. When a company requests that you complete a survey for them, they may also ask you to accept a ‘cookie’ from them. Unfortunately, this is not a tasty chocolate biscuit, but a snippet of code that is generated by the company’s web server and stored on a participant’s computer after they agree to accept the cookie. It then tracks the user’s browsing habits and sends this information back to the company for them to use in their targeted online advertising. This is how Facebook displays adverts and sponsored postings that miraculously all appear to be within user’s areas of interest.

Another issue with a number of online survey services is that of confidentiality. This is due to the ability to share survey accounts between numerous account holders and therefore a situation could arise whereby you complete one survey attached to an account, but not only can the author of that specific survey see your information, but anyone with access to the account (who may not necessarily be part of that particular survey project) can also see it.

When completing surveys, it is imperative that any survey provides an introductory page that allows you to specifically state your consent for the information that you offer, as well as clear and concise information about how the data will be used. If this consent is not asked for then, legally, the information cannot be used. The introductory page to a good survey should also give clear and obvious warnings if it covers potentially sensitive areas and should refer to sources of further support and information on the issues.

Two other areas that participants in surveys should be aware of, is their right to withdrawal and their right to omit certain information. You should always have the ability to exit the survey at any point but you should be aware that any responses up to that point maybe retained. If you don’t wish for this to occur then you could backtrack through the survey and erase any answers you have made. Surveys should always offer you the option of not providing a response to any question, in other words you should not feel pressured or intimidated into thinking that you have got to provide an answer to a question.

As a consequence of the popularity of online surveys, more people are participating; however, this has caused a rise in the number of people giving false or fraudulent information within surveys. For instance, giving a believable, but false name, may not necessarily cause a problem, but giving incorrect addresses can lead to severe consequences. This is due the common habit of people giving the address of their local shop, school or even the address of their neighbours as their own. If this is discovered, there is a possibility that legal action could be brought against the perpetrator. There is also one survey (although it is not be online at present) that you are legally bound to complete correctly and that is the National Census – complete this fraudulently and, if you are found out, you will be in serious trouble.

There are also non-legal reasons for not giving false information on surveys. A lot of companies use given details to send out sample products or even to take part in prize draws, so if you give a false name and address you may never benefit from these offers.

Online surveys are now part of our digital lives and despite being annoying and irritating to some people, it’s unlikely that marketing departments will stop using them in the near future and therefore, it is up to you and I - the digital public, to be savvy about what we should and shouldn’t be presented with when we are requested to complete an online survey.

A few weeks ago we discussed the importance foundation knowledge to aid understanding and teaching of e-safety. This week we are going to dive into some of the fundamentals and introduce the concept of ‘networks’

We are surrounded by networks, be it the National Electricity Grid, The Motorway system, Telephone system or the post Beaching remnants of our national railway and of course the most pertinent to e-safety - The Internet.

Put simply. A network is a system which connects a collection of things. The main business of a network is to allow something to move from one ‘node’ on a network to another. The electricity grid is about moving power to where consumption is needed, the rails network moves passengers to their desired destination and the Internet moves data to where it is required.

Networks may be arranged in different ‘topologies’, the term which describes how nodes are connected to each other. For example some networks are arranged in a ring, where each node is connected to 2 others in a continuous loop - a bit like the Circle Line on the London underground. At the opposite end of the spectrum is a network where every node is directly connected to every other. Some networks require some kind of central authority to control the flow and ‘direct traffic’, others leave it to each node to make decisions about how to get their payload to the desired location.

At this point it is probably worth stepping back a little and talking about the Internet. The Internet is not a single entity, it is in-fact made up of many, many individual networks which connect to each other and are able to interoperate because they all ‘agree’ to use the same language and conventions. In computing we call this shared set of rules a Protocol, and the protocol which the Internet is founded on is known as TCP/IP. This means that networks built in different ways, with different topologies can interact as part of the Internet, as long as they understand and abide by TCP/IP.

It is this interoperability which allows the Internet to make connections between diverse devises, allowing for instance your mobile phone to send data to your computer which can talk to your TV or even a refrigerator.

Each node on a network has an address, this is a unique code which identifies where on the Internet the node is. Not every node on the Internet is directly connected to every other, but a node does know enough about the structure of the Internet to pass the data along to another node which is logically ‘closer’ to the required destination. The Internet therefore at a simplified level works by nodes passing data along to other nodes until the data reaches its final destination.

This is important to understand as it introduces the notion of network resilience though the concept of ‘Redundancy’. Redundancy simply means that there is no single route between two nodes, there are actually multiple paths a piece of data may take to reach the destination node. If one route becomes unavailable (such as due to damage or a computer being switched off) the data finds another route.

This is best illustrated by considering the Telephone network. In the olden days, when a telephone call was made, the two telephones were literally ‘connected’ together. A series of switch boards created a link from one phone to the other. This concept is known as ‘circuit switching’. We’ve all seen picture of old film of people plugging wires into a ‘switch board’ to ‘connect’ a caller - they were manually connecting the circuit. In later years mechanical and then electronic telephone exchanges automated this job, but the concept is the same.

In modern times this idea has been abandoned. We now favour a system known as ‘Packet’ switching. Under this system there is no continuous connection. Instead the telephone converts the sound from a caller into digital information. This information is then split into little chunks called ‘packets’. Each packet of data is transported to the target telephone as a ‘discrete’ transmission. Packets may travel different routes to get to their destination and may even arrive in a different order to the one in which they were sent. However the packets contain enough extra information in them to allow them to be placed in the correct order and the sound to be reassembled by the receiving telephone.

In a circuit switched network a call can fail if the line is cut at any point along its length. In a packet switched network, a lost or damaged connection is routed around.

In actuality, the modern telephone system is a part of the Internet.

So, why should we try and understand networks if we want to better understand e-safety.

Well, the answer is in these three points:

Networks of different types can interconnect
Networks are plentiful
Networks are hard to disrupt, and hard to control.

To be continued...

According to Wikipedia, "The Internet of Things (IoT) is the network of physical objects or "things" embedded with electronics, software, sensors and connectivity to enable it to achieve greater value and service by exchanging data with the manufacturer, operator and/or other connected devices." In short an object that can connect to the Internet.

Two headlines caught my eye recently, "Is your toaster a security risk" and "Barbie gets Internet connection".

What struck me by these stories was that there seems to be no area of life that is out of reach these days when it comes to connectivity.

When I was a child, you played with your friends, they became the characters of the game and you used your imagination. If toys can now answer back, will this stifle creativity, or offer opportunities to learn and explore that are far greater? Whichever is the case, 'smart toys' are set to become more prominent in the market given the number of prototypes released at the recent New York Toy Fair.

It's no surprise that in the home, more and more objects are becoming connected. There are the obvious with smart TVs and games consoles etc, but then we move onto fridges that know what shopping you need to order and systems that mean you can control you heating and lighting remotely. In a recent conversation, I also came across a CCTV system that would allow you to unlock you door to let a (welcome) visitor in if you weren't there, all from a mobile phone app.

With the Internet affecting daily life, you would like to think that you can escape the technology when you got to sleep, but no! Manufactures have recently developed a smart bed, which feeds information about your sleep patterns to your phone. The intention is to monitor sleep behaviour to help you sleep better.

What may be surprising, given the perception of connectivity, is that current statistics suggest only a small percentage of objects are connected (around 10 million worldwide), roughly equating to 1.5 connected devices per person. However, this is predicted to reach 50 million, or an average of 8 connected devices per person in the next 5 years.

One of the big connected device launches that has been in the news recently will be the driverless car, but how long will it be before my shoes can give me directions or my toothbrush can send data to my dentist? Well, apparently, they already can!

What connected device would you like to see? Let us know using the comment section below.