Well Being#

Research ethics is often discussed in terms of protecting study participants, users, system owners, or society at large. However, research can also affect the wellbeing of the people conducting it. Research team members may be exposed to disturbing material, legal uncertainty, harassment, stigma, or other risks as part of their work. These risks should be considered explicitly when planning, reviewing, and reporting a study.¹

This is especially important in security and privacy research because research tasks may involve harmful online content, abuse ecosystems, cybercrime forums, leaked data, malware, extremist material, hate speech, harassment, sexual content, or other sensitive environments. Even when a study does not involve human subjects in the traditional sense, it may still create risks for the researchers, students, annotators, transcribers, contractors, or assistants who collect, inspect, label, or analyze the data.

Examples may include:

• Exposure to hate speech, harassment, violent imagery, or other disturbing content that may negatively affect team members’ psychological wellbeing or lead to emotional exhaustion or secondary trauma.
• Research on powerful institutions, such as state censorship systems or large platforms, that may create legal, political, personal, or career risks for the research team.
• Research on extremist, criminal, or abusive online communities that may expose team members to harassment, doxing, intimidation, or targeted attacks.
• Crawling morally questionable or stigmatized websites from a home network, which may cause ISPs, platforms, employers, or household members to draw incorrect or undesirable conclusions about the researcher.
• Work with leaked credentials, malware, scam infrastructure, or underground forums that may expose team members to legal uncertainty, malware infection, or unwanted contact with hostile actors.

Responsibility#

It is the responsibility of the research lead and the PI to carefully think about which tasks are assigned to whom, what support is available, and how discomfort or distress can be raised without fear of negative consequences.

This is particularly important in hierarchical relationships. A student, intern, or research assistant may feel unable to refuse a task, even when the task makes them uncomfortable. Teams should therefore make refusal, reassignment, and pausing procedures explicit before the work begins.

Planning Before the Study#

Before starting a project, the team should identify whether the work may expose team members to harmful material or other unpleasant situations. If so, the project plan should include concrete safeguards.

The team should discuss what kinds of material may appear, who will handle it, how often exposure will occur, and whether exposure is actually necessary for the research question. Where possible, the study should be designed to reduce direct exposure. For example, researchers may use automated preprocessing, blurred images, paraphrased text, metadata-only inspection, sampling, aggregation, or synthetic examples instead of repeatedly viewing raw material.

The team should also decide which environments and devices are appropriate for the work. Sensitive crawling, malware analysis, or visits to stigmatized websites should not be conducted from a researcher’s home network or personal device unless this has been carefully considered and justified. Institutional infrastructure, VPNs, isolated accounts, dedicated machines, and clear logging practices may reduce risk.

For projects involving potentially harmful material, teams should also create an internal protocol before data collection begins. This protocol does not need to be long, but it should be concrete enough that team members know what to do when something goes wrong.

A useful protocol may cover, what kinds of content or environments the team expects to encounter, how team members can pause, stop, or hand off a task, how sensitive material should be stored, and what technical safeguards should be used. It could also include information about what to do if illegal, extremely disturbing, or unexpectedly sensitive material appears, and who to contact when someone feels uncomfortable or distressed.

What to Report in the Ethics Section#

When a project may affect research team members, the ethics section should describe how those risks were considered and mitigated. The ethics section may explain what kinds of risks to researchers were anticipated, who was exposed to which kinds of material, how exposure was minimized, what internal protocols were used, and how team members could opt out or request reassignment. It may also describe technical safeguards, such as isolated infrastructure, dedicated accounts, or secure storage.

The goal is not to dramatize the researchers’ experience, but to show that the team treated researcher wellbeing as part of responsible research design and give guidance for young researchers reading such papers as inspiration.

Example Papers With Fitting Ethics Sections#

Wei et al. Understanding Help-Seeking and Help-Giving on Social Media for Image-Based Sexual Abuse. USENIX. 2024.

Zhang et al. Abusability of Automation Apps in Intimate Partner Violence. USENIX. 2025.

Sources#