Human rights and the regulation of anonimity. New challenges to law and research

LELL, HELGA

Research Ethics in the Digital Age: Ethics for the Social Sciences and Humanities in Times of Mediatization and Digitization

Springer

Lugar: Wiesbaden; Año: 2018; p. 119 - 128

On May 22, the Special Rapporteur of theHuman Rights Council (UN) pointed out the need to establish new regulationsabout anonymity and freedom of expression in the current age of informatics andtechnology. His main concern is if it is possible or convenient to create legalnational and international rules that may include restrictions to anonymity,and what should be the limits to those legal restrictions.This presentation aims to analyze someaspects of this report and its effects on legal and constitutional theory. Also,but mainly, it intends to go a little further and proposes to explicitly makesome advantages and disadvantages for which the legal regulations might bringup for researchers. The second goal commented in the lastparagraph tries to focus the attention on the fact that when researchers dotheir work, they need data and information. Nowadays, obtaining those data andinformation and processing them might be not prove to be too difficult. However,a few problems show up: 1) Having a lot of data makes quantitativemethods more apparent over qualitative ones; this is not a big problem byitself, but if qualitative research is left aside, a vastly important part ofinnovations and explanations that social and human sciences may give can getlost. Here, the responsibility goes to researchers and researchinginstitutions; 2) Researchers, while doing their jobs,have to quote their resources in order to ?prove? being ethically solid andhave firm grounds for their thesis. If certain relevant data are anonymous, itimplies several problems for quoting or making right explanation as the fontshave no context because of their granted anonymity; 3) If  a body research aims to be applied forcreating public policies, it needs to balance many criteria: who are the peopleor social sectors involved, how to quantify data, which decisions may be betterfor a certain problem, etc. Human reasoning, in this instance, is moreimportant than data obtaining and processing.All of these issues have a commondenominator: how to take care of the human person behind data and information,how to make sure those individuals can enjoy their rights of expression andtheir anonymity when they want to and how to do research be useful in thiscontext.