I take people’s privacy seriously. So, even though posts on public pages are open to anyone, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the people who made the posts want “what they have entered online” to “become [a researcher’s] data unbeknownst to them,” as Tilburg University scholar Piia Varis puts it. For this reason, I get people's informed consent before quoting them in my work, and even then I anonymize the quote as much as possible.

From “Digital Ethnography,” p. 60. In The Routledge Handbook of Language and Digital Communication, edited by Alexandra Georgakopoulou and Tereza Spilioti, Chapter 3, pp. 55–68. Abingdon: Routledge, 2015.