WhatsApp has remained under the radar for it is scarcely accessible to overt scholarly scrutiny. Encrypted chat apps allow for a certain degree of perceived secrecy. Yet the high frequency of civic engagement makes ethnographic research a time-consuming exercise. This article investigates how digital ethnography inside WhatsApp groups requires up-to-date, innovative ethical guidelines. We suggest a two-pronged approach. On the one hand, we should rethink and update ‘known’ ways of doing ethics, undertaking at least three conceptual operations: going back to the basics, positing as central the notion of ‘do not harm’, which allows to re-centre the user within the research process; avoid reducing research ethics to a one-stop checklist, to privilege instead a recursive, iterative and dialogic process able to engage research subjects; moving past the consent form as the sole and merely regulatory moment of the researcher-research subject relationship. On the other hand, while thinking through innovative ways of considering ethics in chat app research, we ought to take infrastructure seriously, both the site of research and the research ecosystem; embrace transparency and avoid by all means covert bypasses; and guarantee full anonymisation to our research subjects.

中文翻译：

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不要在私人聊天应用程序中危害：WhatsApp及其研究的伦理问题

WhatsApp一直受到关注，因为很难进行公开的学术审查。加密的聊天应用程序允许一定程度的保密性。然而，公民参与的频繁性使人种学研究成为一项耗时的工作。本文研究WhatsApp组内部的数字人种志如何要求最新的创新道德准则。我们建议采取两种方法。一方面，我们应该重新考虑和更新“已知”的道德操守方式，至少要进行三个概念性操作：回到基础知识，将“请勿伤害”的概念置于中心位置，这可以使人们重新关注道德操守。研究过程中的用户；避免将研究伦理降低到一站式清单，而应优先考虑能够吸引研究对象的递归，迭代和对话过程；超越同意书是研究者与研究对象之间关系的唯一且唯一的规范时刻。另一方面，在通过创新的方式考虑聊天应用程序研究中的道德时，我们应该认真考虑基础架构，无论是研究站点还是研究生态系统。保持透明，并尽一切可能避免秘密绕开；并保证完全匿名化我们的研究主题。