Research Challenge

While I am an engineer/businessperson and certainly not an ethicist, am I the only one troubled by the morality, even legality, of a professor sending out 8,000 fake résumés (Life of the Mind, Feb. 3) to corporations in the pursuit of his research? The results are certainly interesting, possibly even important, but assuming that only half of the résumés were even looked at, and those for only 10 minutes each, the cost to the recipient companies was about $70,000. Were those same companies to have sent out 8,000 fraudulent job offers or advertisements, I cannot imagine PAW publishing the results without at least questioning the ethical if not legal basis of such actions.

What am I missing?