See, I agree and disagree with that. People on tinder are probably reasonably expecting that their pictures are used for meeting up with locals for the purposes of dating. The debate about whether this is a reasonable expectation isn't really what I'm on about. (Obviously, as techie types, we have a different understanding of how private this stuff really is)

On instagram, it is a broadcasting and publishing platform and it is very clear that by posting a photo, on a non-private-account the photo can be seen and generally browsed by others.

A researcher who conducts a study of "looking at" 400k public instagram photos is doing a different thing than spoofing their location and auto-swiping through 400k lonely hearts.

Obviously people disagree with this since I'm getting downvotes for my position. This is certainly my opinion But I do feel like running a study against one isn't unethical while the other is.

Of course, that should be caveated that "republishing" the scraped data is unreasonable in both cases (IMO). I also think things like this artist http://fortune.com/2015/05/26/instagram-copyright-art/ are reprehensible... but that's art, not science and doesn't actually have the same expectation to abide by ethical principles.