If you want to publish it formally, the journal may impose its own requirements. E.g. back when Facebook did a formal study on their users, they appealed to the users having consented to A/B testing when they accepted Facebook’s TOS. Afterwards, several researchers argued that this broke the rules for informed consent, with one paragraph in the linked article suggesting that the paper might end up retracted by the publisher:
When asked whether the study had had an ethical review before being approved for publication, the US National Academy of Sciences, which published the controversial paper in its Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), told the Guardian that it was investigating the issue.
(I don’t recall hearing what the results of that investigation were, but I don’t think it was ever retracted.)
If you want to publish it formally, the journal may impose its own requirements. E.g. back when Facebook did a formal study on their users, they appealed to the users having consented to A/B testing when they accepted Facebook’s TOS. Afterwards, several researchers argued that this broke the rules for informed consent, with one paragraph in the linked article suggesting that the paper might end up retracted by the publisher:
(I don’t recall hearing what the results of that investigation were, but I don’t think it was ever retracted.)