SAN FRANCISCO – The world’s leader in taking the data of its members and turing it into billions of dollars – Facebook – may have went to far recently when it conducted an experiment without disclosing its intentions to its members.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) received a complaint from the Electronic Privacy Information Center on Thursday, July 3.
According to the complaint:
Facebook’s secretive and non-consensual use of personal information to conduct an ongoing psychological experiment on 700,000 Facebook users, purposefully messed with people’s minds. Facebook altered the News Feeds of Facebook users to elicit positive and negative emotional responses. Facebook conducted the psychological experiment with researchers at Cornell University and the University of California, San Francisco, who failed to follow standard ethical protocols for human subject research.
At the time of the experiment, Facebook did not state in the Data Use Policy that user data would be used for research purposes. Facebook also failed to inform users that their personal information would be shared with researchers. Moreover, at the time of the experiment, Facebook was subject to a consent order with the Federal Trade Commission which required the company to obtain users’ affirmative express consent prior to sharing user information with third parties.
Facebook’s conduct is both a deceptive trade practice under Section 5 of the FTC Act and a violation of the Commission’s 2012 Consent Order.
The Commission should impose sanctions, including a requirement that Facebook make public the algorithm by which it generates the News Feed for all users.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the Facebook study was one of hundreds conducted by the social media behemoth.
A Facebook executive did issue a short apology Wednesday.
Facebook has 802 million daily active users on average as of March, 2014.
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