The pain of crowds

With the increasing availability of data, an increasing social awareness of the impact of individual trauma, and the increasing penetration of HCI into sensitive areas, ethical questions in HCI are more challenging and prevalent than ever. These issues certainly affect the practitioners of HCI in sensitive settings, but also have the potential to affect reviewers and even conference attendees. Moreover, with the challenges raised by big data, it is more important than ever that reviewers are ethically vigilant. This position paper addresses some of the challenges associated with reviewing ethically fraught work, with a view to positioning the responsibility of ethics not just with committees and individual researchers, but with the HCI community as a whole.