Princeton Computer Science Professor Edward Felten accepted a series of public challenges to break into a new computer security system intended to enforce restrictions on the use of digital music files.  The challenges were sponsored by the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI), an industry group.  Felten successfully broke at least four of the six challenges, but when Felten later planned to present his research on the challenges at an academic conference (the 4th International Information Hiding Workshop), he received a letter from the SDMI with a copy sent to the head of his academic department.  The letter asked Felten to withdraw his presentation, and threatened him (and the graduate students working with him) with a lawsuit under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Felten withdrew his presentation, then sued the SDMI, requesting a judgement that the publication or presentation of their research was legal.  The Justice Department and industry spokesmen assured Felten that the legal threats made against him were invalid, and the suit was dismissed.  Felten later presented his paper at the 10th USENIX Security Symposium.

Bronislaw K. Malinowski, a Polish-born founder of social anthropology in Britain, published some of the most influential ethnographies ever written.  After his death, his widow authorized publication of the diaries he kept during fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands.  The diaries caused a controversy in anthropology and led some scholars to revise their opinion of Malinowski.  In the diaries he frequently refers to the Trobriand natives as "doglike," "whorish," and worse; he records his sexual desires for them; and he generally expresses a pervasive sense of racial and cultural superiority that was quite opposite to some of his earlier published work.  The interpretation of his diaries has continued for decades, and his words still motivate debate about the experience of fieldwork in other cultures.

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Northeastern University researchers Gonzalez, Hidalgo, and Barabasi conducted a study of human mobility by tracking the movements of 100,206 individuals randomly selected from 6 million mobile phone users in an unidentified European country.  Research subjects were not informed they were being tracked.  The study was funded in part by the Office of Naval Research, where the institutional review of the ethics of the research "determined that it did not involve human subjects" according to Northeastern University.  The Associated Press quoted co-author Hidalgo as stating the study was ethically defensible because subjects were treated as statistics and not examples (and that "We're not trying to do evil things").  The research concluded that that "human trajectories show a high degree of temporal and spatial regularity."  A U.S. Federal Communications Commission official was quoted as saying that the study would be illegal if it were conducted in the United States.

University of Wisconsin-Madison psychologists Dennis Middlemist, Eric Knowles, and Charles Matter set up a hidden periscope to observe urination in a small public bathroom.  Their studies of urination were investigating the question: Do people become aroused when their personal space is invaded? (among other hypotheses).  Participants were never told that they were part of a research study, and they were never asked if they wanted to participate.  The publication of the study led to an ethical controversy that partly concerned the triviality of the research questions.

To investigate obedience to authority, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments where researchers asked participants to administer what they believed to be painful electric shocks to another person, culminating in shocks that seemed to be potentially fatal.  The majority of participants (65%) were willing to inflict fatal voltages, despite the screams of the simulated victim.  Milgram's membership application in the American Psychological Association was placed on hold for one year while the association investigated the ethics of these studies, but he was then readmitted.  This work later won awards, has been made into a short film and a made-for-TV movie, and has been used to understand war crimes and atrocities.

Traditional anthropological fieldwork involves spending a lengthy period of time living with the community that is being studied.   Many anthropologists both fall in love and/or have sex in the field, and anthropology has long debated the ethics of the practice.  Some anthropologists (e.g., Bolton and Murray) have endorsed this as a research method which has been called "doing fieldwork with one's body" and they have advocated this method for the investigation of sexuality.

Psychologist Philip Zimbardo randomly assigned normal, innocent people to the role of "prisoner" or "guard" in a simulated prison (actually, a university basement).  The experiment had to be halted after the "guards" became sadistic and the "prisoners" became depressed after only two days.  In 2002 the BBC re-ran the experiment as a television show.

In an investigation of norms, psychologist Stanley Milgram has graduate student researchers ask strangers on the NY subway to give up their seat during rush hour for no apparent reason.  Surprisingly, the experiment produced anxiety and physical illness in the researchers (including Milgram).  Student researchers reported that they are still traumatized by the experience thirty years later.

In order to discredit the then-novel approach of cultural studies, physicist Alan Sokal proposes a new "emancipatory mathematics" and a "transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity" in the journal Social Text, then exposes his own article as a hoax after publication, leading to great controversy.

Sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh studied gangs, drugs, and crime in one of Chicago's most dangerous housing projects by joining the gang The Black Kings, and eventually (temporarily) leading it.  His research materials allegedly included drug dealing records left with him in order to prevent their capture by the police.