

Don't fear Facebook's emotion manipulation experiment - arijitraja
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25815-dont-fear-facebooks-emotion-manipulation-experiment.html#.U7Ly55SSxdI

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mullingitover
> You can certainly question whether it is fair to expect users signing up for
> a service like Facebook's to read and understand user agreements containing
> dozens of pages of dense legalese, and which includes a clause consenting to
> the kind of research under discussion.

This apparently needs a correction: Facebook flat-out did not obtain anything
resembling informed consent from their subjects. They added the 'research'
blurb _four months_ after they experimented on their users.[1]

No amount of reading the ToS would've informed you that you were a research
subject.

The thing everyone seems to be missing is a discussion about what Facebook
believes it can do within the parameters of its ToS. I'd love to hear someone
from Facebook explain what they believe they _can_ do, ethically and legally,
and what would be crossing a bright red line.

[1]
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/30/facebook-...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/30/facebook-
only-got-permission-to-do-research-on-users-after-emotion-manipulation-study/)

