Facebook’s experiment

Facebook can do whatever you like. You gave them permission.

There have always been general mutterings about security and the rights to your own content on Facebook. Every now and then you'll see a string of copy and pasted status updates from your friends about how to fiddle about with your settings to ensure your maximum privacy. The latest feather ruffling dates back to 2012, when about 700,000 Facebook users unwittingly participated in an experiment run by the Facebook Data Science Team to see if they could manipulate users' moods by the content they were shown. Unsurprisingly, the answer is yes. The phrase 'like breeds like' isn't bandied around for no reason at all.

Former employees of the Facebook Data Science Team have since come forward and said that there are thousands of experiments performed each week, often with no permission or with any statistical or psychological qualification to back up the vague intentions of each study. This doesn't sound unlikely. Facebook are always changing the look and use of the blue site and they'd need evidence to work out how best to do that. One can only assume they glean that from prodding and twisting the profiles of any number of the 1.3 billion users.

I am surprised that anyone is shocked, frankly. The terms and conditions which constantly change and become ever more complicated and unwieldy are summed up by the idea 'if you are using Facebook you are agreeing that everything you put on here is ours, not yours, to do what we like with.' Anyone who truly believes they still own everything they post is deluded. You'd have to be extremely naive to think your news feed isn't manipulated to encourage you to buy goods and services from the companies who provide the stream of income to keep the company alive and kicking.

If a university wanted to conduct such a study, explicit permissions would be needed. Not at Facebook, remember you already gave permission for them to do whatever they like by signing up in the first place?

ENDS

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