[ooni-dev] Ethics of Censorship Measurement

[Arturo Filastò]

Hello,

I was pointed to this mailing list by Ben Zevenbergen.

It seems like there are a few familiar faces in here and I believe some
of you are already quite familiar with the tool in question.

We have recently had some discussions on our
OONI mailing list about ethics of internet censorship related
measurements and what should be the best procedure for getting informed
consent from our users.

You can find this thread here:
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/ooni-dev/2014-December/000205.html

A volunteer started writing up some improvements to our current warning
message (that is found here:
https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-probe#read-this-before-running-ooniprobe)
and you can find the improvements to it here:
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/ooni-dev/2015-January/000208.html

Some people have pointed out that the above message contains some
wording that is a bit too vague and that can lead to excessively scaring
users (or possibly even putting them in danger because they have
acknoledged that what they are doing could be legal).
This discussion mainly occurred on IRC so unfortunately it's not
captured anywhere, but I would be happy to further elaborate on it if
you are interested.

What we currently would need most is somebody that takes a look at the
tool and thinks about what could be the real risks that a user of it
could possibly face (if any) and come up with a wording that makes these
risks clear to them.

I am happy to further discuss this either via Skype or on our mailing list.

~ Arturo