I was taken by the “psychological study” described in Senemar’s article where Facebook researchers manipulated the emotional tone of the posts Facebook users saw to observe how they would respond. This seems like a hugely inappropriate invasion of privacy. Outside the digital world, you have to fill out all sorts of waivers to be a subject in an experiment. As a researcher, you have to be intentional about getting the consent of your subjects, and as a subject, you have the right to say no. It’s very sinister feeling that the only consent Facebook needs to experiment on you is your creating a profile on their website.
I certainly did not read Facebook’s terms and conditions before clicking the button to certify I had when I signed up for the website at age 14. The percentage of users who did has to be incredibly small. But I’m willing to bet that even if I’d clicked on that link and read the conditions I was agreeing to I would have missed the loopholes that allows Facebook to manipulate its users like lab-rats. That has to be something Facebook wants to obscure, because it’s creepy.
Facebook’s failure (or more accurately, “intentional neglect” – they KNOW nobody reads their terms) to explicitly ask users for permission to engage in such experimentation is unsettling because it removes the humanity from the researchers. Being the subject of a test where you can interact with the people manipulating you is somehow less terrifying than being unconsciously manipulated by your computer screen. We can’t see the programmers behind the algorithm that makes everything we see on Facebook sad, and if they never ask permission to do that to us, we’re even further removed from them. Technology does what technology wants. Researchers get to hide behind technology, and it makes them less accountable.