Author: Maddalena Favaretto, Eva De Clercq, Matthias Briel, Bernice Simone Elger
Publisher: National Library of Medicine
Publication Year: 2020
Summary: The following article discusses the differences between Swiss and U.S. in terms of ethics committees and institutional review board (IRB) regulations for collecting human subjects research data. Although the IRB does take into account ethical considerations for research, those are not the primary focus, and often projects with the worst ethical implications are exempt from IRB review. These studies have caused public mistrust in data scientists, and therefore, the U.S. should adopt the Swiss model with an additional ethical review board to evaluate the ethics of data obtained from social media companies.