ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some of the ways in which questions of privacy have become all pervasive when considering the technologies that have come to dominate our lives over the last two decades. The challenge is to examine the trade-offs and compromises that come with critical research that employs technologies originally created for ethically questionable purposes. It is intellectually lazy to merely dismiss the research methods that these technologies enable as being positivist and therefore bad. The invasion of new technologies into every aspect of our lives goes well beyond the information we share on social media. The paradox for researchers is that these data are simultaneously intimate and disembodied. The individual is reduced to a series of data points – the websites visited, the products bought, the stories ‘liked’. Drilling down into these data can reveal many intimate details about the individual.
