
Measuring Long-Term Causal Impact of Ads on LinkedIn Users - gwern
https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.03098
======
floatingatoll
v2 is zero bytes, but v1 works:
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.03098v1](https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.03098v1)

This preprint paper contains no indication of participation by an Ethical
Review Board and lists 5 @linked.com email addresses as the sole authors.

How is this study ethically responsible?

~~~
londons_explore
What ethical concerns do you see?

~~~
floatingatoll
They’re studying the long-term perceptual impact of advertising on test
subjects who did not authorize being participants in this experiment. That
goes far beyond “is our advertising effective?” and instead verges on “how
does our advertising permanently affect human behavior?”.

I don’t trust LinkedIn to act ethically in such a regard. Do you?

~~~
nabla9
Are you sure?

[https://www.linkedin.com/legal/user-
agreement](https://www.linkedin.com/legal/user-agreement)

>When you use our Services you agree to all of these terms. Your use of our
Services is also subject to our Cookie Policy and our Privacy Policy, which
covers how we collect, use, share, and store your personal information.

[https://www.linkedin.com/legal/privacy-
policy](https://www.linkedin.com/legal/privacy-policy)

>We use the personal data available to us to research social, economic and
workplace trends such as jobs availability and skills needed for these jobs
and policies that help bridge the gap in various industries and geographic
areas. In some cases, we work with trusted third parties to perform this
research, under controls that are designed to protect your privacy. We publish
or allow others to publish economic insights, presented as aggregated data
rather than personal data.

~~~
majewsky
"But it's _technically_ legal!" is not a valid argument in a discussion about
ethical concerns.

~~~
fwn
Applying the principle of charity our parent quoted their terms to demonstrate
consent, not legal trickery.

The criticism against this argument would be that those terms aren't
sufficient to provide consent as people habitually ignore them.

Not sure what would count as the morally appropriate implementation of
consent. Probably some middle-ground between buried in terms and continuously
re-emerging full screen blocking warning labels.

The easy way out is probably found in some of the legal implementations of
sufficiently informed consent.

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ronilan
I’d like to see a study Measuring Long-Term Casual Impact of LinkedIn
recruiter activity on LinkedIn users.

------
awinter-py
see also a similar paper from google about long term user satisfaction, ad
blindness, and short term metrics that predict long term ones

[https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...](https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/43887.pdf)

~~~
gwern
Here's a discussion of all the papers I know measuring the causal impact of
ads:
[https://www.gwern.net/Ads#replication](https://www.gwern.net/Ads#replication)

~~~
barber5
Thanks for posting this. I'm doing research in this area and this is fantastic

~~~
gwern
Glad to help. If you're running any experiments (I'm still in the middle of
the followup to my first one), I'd like to hear about the results.

