Privacy Group Complains to F.T.C. About Facebook Emotion Study; New York Times, 7/3/14

Vindu Goel, New York Times; Privacy Group Complains to F.T.C. About Facebook Emotion Study:

"The group, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said Facebook had deceived its users and violated the terms of a 2012 consent decree with the F.T.C., which is the principal regulatory agency overseeing consumer privacy in the United States...

And on Thursday, the journal that published the study, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, issued an “expression of concern” regarding Facebook’s decision not to get explicit consent from the affected users before running the study.

“Obtaining informed consent and allowing participants to opt out are best practices in most instances under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Policy for the Protection of Human Research Subjects,” Inder M. Verma, the journal’s editor-in-chief, wrote in the note.

Although academic researchers are generally expected to follow the policy, Facebook, as a private company, was not required to do so, Mr. Verma said. “It is nevertheless a matter of concern that the collection of the data by Facebook may have involved practices that were not fully consistent with the principles of obtaining informed consent and allowing participants to opt out,” he said."