The review of the scientific literature identified a small number of articles that provide ethical guidelines for engaging participants in online research. This is best illustrated in three case studies [54, 59, 71], in which the authors list and present solutions to ethical problems that arise when recruiting young people on social networks and discussion forums. Other articles also provided ethical advice by discussing challenges encountered, changes in study design, and strategies used to use email in family history [74], recruit participants for online focus groups [60, 62], and search for participants in online research [44, 47]. Several articles have asked researchers to publish the methodological and ethical challenges they face when engaging participants in online research and how these problems can be addressed [44, 59, 71, 72, 74], particularly in finding participants [45, 47] and engaging youth [73]. A grey literature review revealed a set of guidelines published from January 2006 to February 2016 that are specific to the ethical conduct of internet research. These included five professional guidelines developed by government agencies, corporations and collaborative academic working groups (see Table 3) and ten higher education policies (see Table 4). Other resources included book chapters and websites. Here are some plausible candidates for individual ethical behavior standards: The second single question of checking participants` age was an important but difficult aspect of involving minors in online research, as young people can skew their age to participate. The articles suggested several strategies for verifying age, including contacting the participant or their parents directly. However, depending on the nature and context of the study, this may be inappropriate or impractical. Others suggested validating participants` ages by checking social media profiles.

This raises other concerns about participants` privacy and may not be a valid approach if the minor has falsified their age (for example, Facebook users must be at least 13 years old to create an account). The articles did not explicitly discuss the ethical implications of inadvertently involving younger or underage participants in research, although they may be exposed to sensitive or age-inappropriate content. Guidelines on this topic are mixed: one guideline [98] suggests that researchers incorporate fact-checking measures into online search tools or use age verification software; Others suggest limiting online research with minors to minimal-risk research [103] or conducting offline research [99]. The majority of research papers reported approval from an ethics board or institutional review board (n=46/58; 79%). Ethical recognition was not explicitly mentioned in 10 articles (17%). One article indicated that the researchers had not sought ethics approval [48] and another was described as exempt from ethics review [49]. Of the 58 research articles identified in the review, only three [35, 37, 82] described adherence to Internet-specific ethical guidelines when designing or conducting their online research: these included professional guidelines from the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) [83] and the American Psychological Association (APA) [84], and practical advice in the academic literature [71, 85]. Some sections [20, 42, 54, 65, 86] referred to consultation with ethics guidelines prepared by their institutional review board [56], country of origin (e.g., National Declaration on the Ethics of Human Research [27], Belmont Report [87]) or the World Medical Association [88]. However, none of them contain specific ethical guidelines for conducting research on the Internet.

While the Belmont Report clearly precedes Internet search, other more recent guidelines do not address the Internet or online search. A small number of Internet-specific ethical guidelines have been recommended in articles [59, 64, 71], including professional guidelines published by AoIR [83, 89], APA [84] and the British Psychological Society (BPS) [90, 91]. Other Internet-specific ethical resources were also briefly mentioned [92–96]. We are left with the ethical question: who is responsible for ensuring that technology is used correctly and beneficially? We have seen that many globalized institutions probably could not exist without the Internet. However, it cannot be fair to blame the Internet for all the bad consequences of every Internet application. On the one hand, even with the best due diligence, not all consequences are predictable. On the other hand, no institution is ethically responsible for all the consequences of its actions. Three levels of ethical principles are: individual, social and global. Social principles apply within a society, a group whose members share cooperative benefits and burdens. Global or transnational principles apply to concerns that cannot be resolved by division between societies. The ethical issues of the Internet concern the principles at these three levels.

In my discussion of ethical cases on the Internet, I will apply certain ethical standards at all three levels. The Internet is an increasingly popular tool in family and child research, which is believed to raise new ethical challenges, but few studies have systematically assessed the ethical issues of parental and child involvement in online research. This scoping review aims to identify and integrate evidence on ethical issues reported in the recruitment, retention and tracing of families and children in online research, and to identify ethical guidelines for Internet research. Thus, fair taxation is based on the location of the infrastructure that supports the functioning of the taxed society. The state of California currently has a so-called “use tax” on Internet transactions. This tax, in the same amount as the sales tax, is levied at the same time as the state income tax. But how can this be a fair tax on a typical Dell Inspiron laptop. Co-designed in Austin, TX and Taiwan, assembled in Malaysia with parts from the Philippines, Japan, Korea, Costa Rica, Mexico, Taiwan, Israel or China? (Friedman 2005:415-417) Calling this a “use tax” is an unwarranted attempt by California to circumvent the Supreme Court`s sales tax locality principle. California has no ethical basis for its use tax.

At most, the portion of the transaction that requires California infrastructure should be taxed. The review identified three unique ethical issues to consider when conducting online searches by minors. The first concerns the ethical and practical complexity of obtaining parental consent online. Parental consent serves to respect and protect children`s evolving autonomy [27], although in some cases it may not be adequate or protective. Inconsistent approaches and ambiguities in the definition of an adolescent, mature secondary research, and minimal risk research have led to an extensive debate on the ethics and value of parental consent [116-118]. As this review acknowledges, parental consent arrangements vary depending on location, age of the participant, research design and context, and are subject to case-by-case interpretation by ethics boards [119, 120]. Academic researchers have used a variety of methods to collect parental consent. Restrictions were reported for offline and online procedures, and many authors noted a lack of guidelines for ethical best practices. This was reflected in the grey literature review, which did not provide formal guidance on the online documentation of parental consent. Instead, professional guidelines suggest that researchers use offline consent procedures [90, 99], while one academic policy recommends limiting online research involving minors to low-risk research that qualifies for parental consent exemption [103]. Guidelines on ethical best practices for obtaining parental consent online are clearly needed. In the meantime, researchers and ethics committees can consult the literature identified in this review [59] and elsewhere [4, 121].

Our review shows that researchers see themselves as primarily responsible for ensuring that Internet research is conducted ethically, but it is not clear to what extent researchers are aware of the specific ethical issues associated with the participation of research participants, particularly minors.