’We have to ask ourselves what to do with hacked data’

Biotethicist Marcello Ienca (Photograph: private) - In recent years, there have been several incidents of hacked databases, and the hackers published the stolen data on the internet. Are scientists allowed to use such data for their research? ETH Zurich bioethicists Marcello Ienca and Professor Effy Vayena have addressed this question in a paper published Machine Intelligence. ETH News spoke with Ienca. ETH News: Are scientists allowed to analyse hacked data published on the Internet, from a purely legal point of view? - Marcello Ienca: The short answer is yes - at least if the scientists themselves are not responsible for the hacking, because hacking itself is a felony. However, if anonymous hackers upload data on a public repository, it is public data. The answer is less clear when scientists aim to download this data onto their own computers. In some jurisdictions, this could be construed as possession of stolen property.