 The phenomenon of the social web forces an ongoing negotiation between researchers and their data sources, as seen in the Facebook contagion study and the subsequent reaction to it. Moreover, with the growing use and concentration of mobile devices, the notion of Internet research is expanding with a movement away from a “place-based” Internet to a dispersed reality. Data collection from mobile devices has increased exponentially. For example, mobile devices enable the use of synchronous data collection and dissemination from non-place based environments. Researchers using cloud-enabled applications can send and receive data to and from participants synchronously. The impact of such research possibilities for epidemiological research is staggering for its scientific potential while demanding for the concurrent ethical challenges, as we are seeing with mobile-based COVID-19 research (Drew et al., 2020) and the sampling of subjects' current behaviors and experiences in real-time (Hubach et al., forthcoming). As Internet research has grown from a niche methodology into a nearly ubiquitous and often invisible practice, the traditional concepts of human subjects research require careful consideration.