## 1 Introduction
### Ethical Considerations  
Studies have been performed to help navigate the ethical considerations when applying fake personas for research purposes. Most of this work aims to protect stakeholders in online social networks. In such cases, the ethical considerations deal with protecting users, the providers of the service, and the advertisers and investors in such services. In terms of research, there are ethical ramifications regarding other users and their consent to be active in the study being conducted, and the indirect exposure of their information. Outside exposure of information, there is also the wasting of time or resources of other users or third parties invested in the network. An army of fake bots would actively be violating agreements required for the service, and waste server resources satisfying the requests of fake users. Further, depending on the influx of fake accounts, statistics that drive value and advertiser spending could be impacted [22]. Researchers in several cases have managed to infiltrate private organizations through strategic social bots targeting users involved in the organization [29]. Critics of this kind of information gathering have noted that a more ethical route would be designing a closed model to determine how vulnerable information might be taken or shared, but previous research has shown utilizing fake accounts in the real world is far more effective and can be conducted if certain limitations in size and scope are applied [30,31].  
Using fake identities is a potent avenue of information gathering and enters into a challenging ethical arena when for most use cases of the technology effective data collection requires some level of deception. However, various international review boards have begun classifying risk levels to the implementation of fake identities for studies, especially in regard to OSNs. The three categories of research in this area are observational, interactive, and survey/interview [32]. Our use case falls under the _observational_ research category, in that identities are being utilized as an instrument to safely observe how different entities interact with users and leverage their PI. Using real information to conduct such a study would be unethical according to several ethical guidelines that warn against placing compromising information at risk. We have, therefore, bounded our fake IDs by intentionally limiting the scope of information used in creating them (e.g., no social security numbers, driver's license numbers, etc.), and actively de-validating any data that could be traced back to a real source, such as our random address generation. In addition, though the project aims to generate 100 K IDs, only a small number of IDs are dedicated to fake accounts at any one service provider, minimizing the impact on the hosts. Should other experiments or operations legally require fake identities that possess such information, the assignment of the additional information can follow similar models as described previously. Additional evaluations of the ethical considerations for active OSINT research, including a self-evaluation of the Use and Abuse project against criteria provided in the Department of Homeland Security's _Ethics and OSINT Scorecard[33]_ is provided in [11].