If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging: legal and ethical issues of text/data mining in research

When considering the range of legal and ethical issues that can arise from text/data mining practices in academic research, the comparative paucity of literature addressing those issues, as well as the apparent lack of any community or discipline-generated ethical framework or initiative, is striking. It is suggested that while technical expertise in this space may be developing apace, and there is increasing recognition of its potential economic and commercial importance, that academic data/text mining researchers would be remiss not to seize the opportunity, as other research communities have done, to seek to ensure that the legal and ethics research paradigm within which their institutions want them to operate, appropriately reflects the contexts and risks actually applicable to their work.